


Survival Is A Four Letter Word

by carteblanchhe



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Angst, Big Gay Love Story, Canon-Typical Violence, Drama, Falling In Love, Fluff, Gay, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, M/M, Minor Character Death, Romance, Slow Build, Smut, World War II, nursing back to health
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-28
Updated: 2018-08-05
Packaged: 2019-05-14 23:58:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 27,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14779721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carteblanchhe/pseuds/carteblanchhe
Summary: Bucky is a young man trapped in Nazi occupied France during WWII and harboring a injured American pilot in his attic, what could go wrong? Turn's out a lot when your country is invaded by Nazi's and trust is not an easy thing to find. This is a love story. A story about war and loss, what it takes to survive, and how sometimes you just might find yourself amidst it all.





	1. The Fall

**Author's Note:**

> This is a historical WW2 AU drama. I just want to warn you that while I’m not writing a depressing or dark story at all, this will be historically accurate in depictions of the atrocities that took place during the war. But this is not a story about that. This is a love story that has taken some great liberties with the original characters and reworked them into France circa 1940-45. I do hope you enjoy it and will join me on this journey.
> 
> Also I've got 9 of the planned 14 chapters (plus epilogue) written and hope to post a new chapter every week until finished. Fingers crossed! Eeeeee!

**Prologue** (1930)

 

There was no place quite like Paris in the summer. It would came alive in a way only Paris can; it resonated deep in your bones, a collective high shared by the city’s inhabitants. There was one particular summer’s day, many years ago, that was memorable for many reasons. It was one of the first real days where the sun seemed to speak to the whole city, inviting its inhabitants to throw their worries aside and escape outdoors with its soft golden hue cast on a clear sky and a salty breeze from the west that tasted of the sea. Work was put on hold, errands postponed, and dour moods dispersed as the collective Parisian spirit drew everyone to the famous Jardins speckled among the sprawling French metropolis.

 

The Jardin des Tuileries was Bucky’s favorite because on days like today it really came alive. The pathways that crisscrossed the park filled with entertainments for the public; acrobats, puppet theatres, fresh juice stands, donkey rides, and markets filled with toys, fruits, and handmade crafts. Parents popped champagne atop checkered blankets underneath the shade of tall trees while their children ran free among the attractions, legs kicking up dirt and laughter.

 

Today, fresh squeezed lemonade in hand, Bucky visited his favorite spot: the large octagonal basin. The wind was just right to power the small sails of the painstakingly crafted toy boats atop glimmering waters, sun beating against the white cloth and varnished wood. Although young Bucky had yet to ever set foot on a real sailboat, he dreamed of the day when he would sail away to places unknown. The America’s, the wild jungles of Africa, the turquoise blue waters of French Polynesia; it didn’t matter so long as the sun was at his back, wind lifting his sails and ocean spray tickling his face. He craved a journey, to be like the explorers of old who discovered worlds unseen; to feel alive. 

 

The world seemed so small, dangerously so now, in Europe. Paris was unwieldy large; people encroaching from every corner, the cacophony of city life as horns honked, carriages clattered, the gush of voices spilling out of open windows and packed markets overwhelmed. It seemed inconceivable that such a beautiful place could host so much ugly noise.

 

Today it wasn’t much quieter in the park, but still Bucky soaked in the chirp of birds and the merry rustle of leaves twisted by wind as he ran along the edge of the basin, racing the nearest sail boat. He sped past a group of rowdy boys playing rugby. Ahead of him a small child tentatively dipped his hand in the waters edge, completely unseen as Bucky’s undivided attention remained on the sail boat. In fact he didn’t notice the boy until their legs tangled. Bucky hit the pavement with flash of pain as the boy tipped forward and plopped in.

 

“Mon Dieu!” Bucky gasped, twisting upright and lunging forward to pluck the boy from the green water. “Je ne t’ai pas vu! Je suis désolé!”

 

The boy was remarkably small for his age, arms as thin as the new branches sprouting on saplings around the Jardins. Bucky felt as if he could have tossed him in the air and he might have floated away on the soft breeze’s back. Instead he set him down on the hot asphalt and studied the startled look situated on his face. He had dark circles under his eyes and shaggy blonde bangs that tickled long lashes, under which startlingly blue eyes stared back with an explosion of mirth. It bubbled up his throat and out in a joyous laughter so infectious Bucky couldn’t help but join in.

 

Eventually the hysteria subsided enough for Bucky to realize this impossibly frail boy wasn’t French.

 

“Tu es Américain? Incroyable!” Bucky gasped. He knew all about the American’s. His father was one after all, a proud fact he loved to share with any and all he could. “So’s mon Papa!”

 

The American nodded and stood, knees a little wobbly, but sturdy nonetheless. He stuck out a wet hand very formally for a handshake, but the wide smile on his face was nothing but inviting. “Thank you for pulling me out. It’s a pleasure to meet you, I’m—“

 

A leathery orange rugby ball flew into their midst and almost knocked the small boy over again, suspending their conversation. The group of boys cried out for it to be tossed back and so the American reached down to pick up the ball and throw it back. His right arm geared backwards and then launched the ball straight into the pavement. The other kids all looked at each other in dismay for a moment before laughing riotously at the ineptitude of the boy. Then came a cascade of taunts in French the likes of which caused Bucky’s ears to tint red with rage. Couldn’t they see he wasn’t well? 

 

Bucky snatched up the rugby ball and punted it with all the force his young leg could muster. He may only have been six years old, but he was big for his age, closer in size to the ten year olds that played rugby than the frail American. The ball soared through the air and smashed into the unsuspecting face of the largest laughing bully. 

 

“You wanna say those words to my face, you dumb beast!” Bucky shouted back fearlessly, chest swelled. His left hand slashed out furiously, spraying in a wide arc fresh lemonade everywhere. “Didn’t your mother ever tell…” Bucky trailed off when a small damp hand rested tentatively on his shoulder, delicately turning him away from the bullies. His eyes implored him to let it go. Bucky wasn’t very good at such things. His temper was a brush fire, quick to spread and hard to reign in, but he swallowed it down and took the American’s hand in his. 

 

“Come with me!”

 

They ran away from the angry French boys before they got their wits about themselves to retaliate, and disappeared deeper into the jardin. They ran past a puppet show during the climactic battle of a dragon slaying, on through a field of flowers, chasing butterflies and sending pigeons into flight, laughing all the while. They didn’t stop until they stumbled upon a troupe of musicians playing violins. A group of veterans of the Great War, recognizable by their many missing limbs and scars, watched from the benches. 

 

“Those boys are goons,” Bucky said, the anger having long subsided on their dash through the park. But the American didn’t seem phased in the lightest, only winded by their run.

 

“It’s okay. Besides, I don’t know French so I’ll imagine they were complimenting my spiffy shoes.” He clicked his heels together. 

 

“So, your pops from the States?”

 

Bucky studied the American. His blue star spangled suspenders, khaki shorts and white collared shirt gave the air of wealth, but he wore it uncomfortably, like it didn’t quite fit him despite the tailored look. 

 

“Yeah he came over during the war, fell in love with Maman, and stayed when it was all over. He’s from Brooklyn.”

 

“Wowza, really?” The American gasped. “I’m from Brooklyn!”

 

There was that smile again, spread wide across his face, all white teeth and the hint of a tongue pressed against them. Bucky wondered where such confidence came from for such a small boy. He was utterly fascinated. Now that they had spoken more he could hear the similarity in accent to the one Papa still carried.

 

“How old are you?”

 

“Today is my birthday if you’d believe it, I’m ten.” The American held up both hands, his shoulders swaying to the pluck of violin strings joyfully. 

 

“Non!” Bucky couldn’t believe he was so much older. Bucky was almost a head taller than the boy. He wondered what ailed the kid. He had heard of such diseases as polio and meningitis, diseases that swept through small towns making many of the very young and old ill. But despite his frail looks his spirit was defiantly optimistic. Bucky felt himself drawn to the magnetic confidence of this little American, his earnestness, and the kindness clearly cradled in his heart.

 

“Bon anniversaire, mon amie!” Bucky enthused, gripping the American’s bony shoulders and pulling him into the crowd to dance before the violinists. “You’ve been given a true Parisian day to celebrate. I’m jealous, it’s never this nice out for my birthday.”

 

The American clearly had never been given a dance lesson in his life, but he moved with such pure joy in his jerky movements Bucky was enthralled. They bounced on the balls of their feet invigorated by the hooting veteran’s and the upward turn in tempo as the violinists responded to the children's infectious delight. Bucky could have danced the afternoon away with this boy. There was something in the back of his head, a voice that told him not to let him go. Hold tight. He didn’t understand what it meant, and he wouldn’t, not until many years later when he would look back on this glossy memory and realize what it all meant. How this memory stood out above the others, a golden hue to it that attracted the mind’s eye over all the others. 

 

Unfortunately the moment was forced to an early close when the American’s mother appeared in the crowd, a frantic look of motherly terror laced in the red veins of her eyes as she finally found her son.

 

“I’ve been looking everywhere, you gave me such a terror!” She admonished as she took her son’s small wrist and dragged him away. The veteran’s tutted at the abrupt end to the show and Bucky tried to apologize. It was his fault he stole the boy away. But she was having none of it. “He’s very delicate and recovering. You shouldn’t be getting him all worked up like that!” 

 

Bucky frowned defiantly at the woman, but fell back as she snatched the object of his fascination from him. The American stole a final look back at Bucky as he was steered through the crowd. There was a longing in his soft blue eyes that pricked at Bucky’s heart and was mirrored by his own crestfallen face. Then he was gone; the violinists brought their show to an end, the crowd dispersed, and Bucky was alone. He never even got the boy’s name. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

**Chapter One - The Fall**

 

The headline read: _Enemies From All Sides: Italy Declares War Against France._ Despite being left behind in Paris while the world morphed into something darker, deadlier all around him, this was the one small blessing Bucky could find in his life. Delivering the morning paper to the stands around town gave him the chance to stay abreast of the developments on the front and whom had died in combat. Each morning he would frantically flip to the list printed on page ten of those who perished, searching fearfully for a name he might recognize, and feeling a sense of relief wash over his tensed bones as he realized Papa was still alive.

 

And then he would fill with a youthful rage at the abandonment he felt all over again. It smoldered in him all the time, a well tended bed of coals easily stoked into flames. He was capable, he was strong headed, and more than ready to fight. But at sixteen he was just too young to enlist and he had a younger sister to care for now that Papa was at the front and mother taken from them long ago. It didn’t seem fair. Why should he be left to look after her? What of his Aunt in Marseilles? Maman’s sister had visited them once since Maman’s death and while Bucky was never sure of the real reason for her absence he knew it had to do something with Maman’s marriage to an American Protestant. 

 

Paris was on edge. It was palpable in the air as Bucky made his way to his favorite cafe in Le Marais where they lived; the bombings last week that took almost three hundred lives were fresh on everyone’s mind. It felt like taking life in your own hands every moment you were exposed on the streets. But this was a bi-weekly tradition to meet with his best friend Wanda before he had to fetch his sister from school. They saw so little of each other anymore as the daily duties of life began to pile up the older they grew. It was the one tradition they held steadfast to so as not to lose touch. War had changed things. 

 

“Salut! Over here!” Wanda’s bright voice cut through the stale air tainted with vehicle exhaust. 

 

Bucky found her already seated in their spot on the corner of the building, two café au laits on the green wrought iron table. He joined her and took a greedy mouthful of the coffee. 

 

“Did you see the news today?” Wanda asked, big brown eyes dissecting Bucky’s face. She could quickly read his moods by the set of his brows and turn of his lip, or so she said. 

 

“Of course I did, I deliver papers. Must we talk about the war?”

 

“So you’re in one of those moods, lovely.” She pulled her long black locks over her shoulder and began braiding them. “How about we talk about Pierre Clement’s shot gun wedding with Stephanie Dubois?”

 

“Ha, that imbécile, he was always doomed to settle early.” Bucky laughed, spirits lifted by the shift towards tawdry gossip. Wanda kept up with their classes, while Bucky had dropped out to try and join the war, only to be denied so he picked up a job to support his sister. 

 

There was a deep rumble that seemed to resonate from the earth below, rising up the legs of the table and clattering the cups in their saucers. Bucky craned his neck to look down the bend of the street for the source.The men at the last newsstand he made his delivery to that day had whispered conspiratorially with others about government officials fleeing south. He had ignored it as baseless gossip, but now he wondered as military trucks turned the corner and blazed down the street, soldiers seated stoically in the truck beds. 

 

Most of them were too old by Bucky’s standards to be infantry men, but that was how it was, a new generation of boys still too young to pick up the mantle of war and so many of the last generation wiped out in the previous war it was a wonder they had any soldiers at all to defend them.

 

Bucky twisted in his seat to watch as the parade of military vehicles spit black soot on the cobblestone as they past. The anger welled up inside him again, the coals stoked until large flames wicked up inside him and burned out his retinas. His smoldering stare followed the infantry men on the back of the trucks and one of them, a lean mustached man in his late thirties tipped his cap at him and winked. Bucky swung back around to face Wanda, disgruntled. 

 

“Still peeved off about being rejected?” She smiled into her cup and took a sip, hair braids forgotten.

 

“I wasn’t _rejected_ , just not old enough to enlist.” And yes he was peeved off. 

 

“Well, you’re needed here. By your sister and by me, so how about you suck it up, quit the brooding over things you can’t change and start living your life here, oui?”

 

His glower only increased. Wanda rolled her eyes and tossed back her hair, leaning forward with a serious look.

 

“You don’t date, you don’t have any friends other than me—ah-ah,“ Bucky was about to protest when she held up a hand. “I know everyone, you know this. There is no one else you spend time with. You isolate yourself and I don’t like it. Let me set you up with Marguerite, I know she still pines for you even after you stood her up at the Fair.”

 

“Wanda, my dear, you exhaust me.”

 

“And you love it.”

 

“Maybe so, but now I must leave to fetch the only other person I know apparently.” Bucky finished his coffee and left a franc on the table.

 

“Don’t be dramatic,” Wanda batted her eyelashes at him as he rose. “I only want you to be happy, mon amie. S’il vous-plaît, don’t be so quick to write it off. So you can’t join the army, is that so bad? Maybe you find yourself love and make the world a little better for it? We’ve too much strife in this godforsaken place already.”

 

She was right, but he would never admit it, least of all to her. 

 

“Can’t we keep pretending you’re my lover, everyone already thinks it.”

 

“Bah, please James! I have a hard enough time meeting a nice Jewish man as it is, I don’t need you scaring them away with your wily Protestant morals.”

 

Bucky’s head fell back and a laugh bubbled out loud as an ill-timed belch. They were good at egging each other on. But he knew when to call it quits. He kissed her on each cheek and parted ways. 

 

***

 

The walk from Peggy’s school to their apartment took them along the Sienne River bespeckled with docked house boats, which always attracted a good deal of Bucky’s attention. He would studiously stare at the boats, dreams of far flung destinations reflected in his irises. A home could be made at the end of the world with one of those. But the Notre Dame Cathedral always stole back his attention and reminded him of the wonders he lived among too. Paris truly was a gem surrounded by barbarians. 

 

“Do you think he’s homesick?” Peggy watched Bucky, her black pillbox hat askew, brown curls unwieldy beneath. 

 

“I don’t know,” Bucky’s tone was clipped. He didn’t want to talk about this every walk, yet she never ceased to bring up Papa. 

 

“I’m sure he must miss your cooking,” She insisted. “I know I would.”

 

“We all know you would be just fine, that hollow leg of yours never seems too picky about the food it chooses to inhale.” Bucky knocked her shoulder, smile notched in the corner of his mouth. She had a voracious appetite that was shocking to behold.

 

“When you’re always hungry anything does in a pinch, even Natasha’s kholodet’s.” 

 

Peggy laughed at Bucky’s face, his lips instinctively curled in at the memory of the Russian’s cold meat jelly dish. “Please don’t ever bring such vile things into our home again Margaret.”

 

Mercifully, Peggy was quiet for a few more blocks before she launched back into it. “Do you think Papa will be home before Bastille Day?”

 

Bucky released a sharp spurt of air through his nostrils and Peggy jammed her shoulder into his side. 

 

“I do not know. I’m sure he misses us as much as we miss him, but he has done this before. I’m sure he is fine.” Bucky hated thinking about it for long. A great battle of his own waged inside him, one side wishing to fulfill his familial duties, the other wanting nothing more than to run off to the front line and lay waste to as many of the enemy as he could. He didn’t understand how everyone could just continue to go about their lives as if it couldn’t all end tomorrow. Even the day after the bombings everyone continued on as if it were another normal Sunday. It seemed beyond cowardly to him.

 

They turned up the main boulevard into Le Marais that lead them home a few minutes later. The building was an elegant old neoclassical structure. One would think it would be filled with rich businessmen, but it was actually packed with an eclectic mix of artists, shopkeepers, trade unionists, and the occasional communist. Papa was shopkeep of his own popular bookstore. Reading had been one of his favorite pastimes and what got him through the first war, so when he moved to Paris to settle down with Maman he opened his own shop. Bucky had many fond memories of Papa reading to him and Peggy at night before bed. Life had seemed so blissful, they never knew the before. And then war came again and he sold the shop and left all the money to Bucky so they could keep their apartment and not starve while he was gone.

 

Just inside the giant carved oak doors was a small lobby currently occupied by the two biggest personalities in their five story apartment complex. Arnie Roth seemed to have cornered Natasha Romanov near the stairwell with her grocery bag of meats and baguettes. Bucky could tell she was exasperated by Arnie, but everything was always expertly contained underneath a constant pinched look of haughty disinterest.

 

“‘Tasha!” Peggy shouted and darted from Bucky’s side to greet her favorite tenant. Natasha turned to the newcomers and gave a crooked smile to the youngest among them. She had a soft spot for the youngest Barnes, if anything about Natasha could be considered soft. The Russian immigrant was an impossible nut to crack and an expert at control, never letting on her true intentions or feelings in any given situation. 

 

“Oh my young thing, don’t you look chic in that little hat!” Arnie gushed, sweeping his signature lavender shawl over his shoulders as he bent down to greet Peggy. 

 

Natasha regarded her with a look of sincere relief, but it was wiped clean from her face as fast as it appeared. “Ma petit chérie,” Her fingers, pale as snow, pinched Peggy’s cheeks. “I apologize, but I must get these meats upstairs before they spoil.”

 

She nodded at Bucky and then swept from the room, the smells of her powerful perfume and fresh baked bread trailing in her wake. Bucky wished she had stayed. He did not like to be alone with Arnie. They all knew what he was and none seemed to mind his flamboyance, but Bucky always worried he might look too closely and see something he shouldn’t. So he lingered back as Peggy showed Arnie the watercolors she had painted that day in the style of Monet—Papa’s favorite. 

 

“My dear you do have a great eye! Maybe I shall have you come by my apartment one day and paint the walls of my parlour, it would be magnifique, non?”

 

Peggy beamed like a puppy praised for being a good girl. Arnie’s crinkled eyes flitted to Bucky, “And still you grow more, Monsieur Barnes, I swear to Saint Genevieve if you don’t stop growing you’ll outgrow this very building!”

 

“I know it’s such a nuisance, he keeps outgrowing his shoes and clothing and there is only so much my patchwork can do!” Peggy exclaimed and Bucky just shook his head lightheartedly.

 

“I tell you there is no point in patching them when another week from now I'll have outgrown them even more.”

 

“Sure and so you suggest we just go down to the department stores and buy you new clothes every week? We’ll be broke before summer!”

 

“That won't do, I promised your Papa I’d keep an eye on you two,” Arnie whispered conspiratorially between the two of them. 

 

Bucky rolled his eyes and took Peggy’s hand in his, tugging her towards the stairwell. “While we do appreciate the sentiment, Monsieur Roth, we are managing just fine on our own. Bon journée.”

 

If Arnie seemed perturbed at the brush aside he didn’t let it show. He just watched with a wide toothy grin as they ascended the stairs until out of view. Once in their spacious (by Parisian standards) apartment Bucky could breath again. He was just being paranoid, but he thought there was something knowing in Arnie’s eyes and he didn’t like to linger on what it might mean.

 

The sun sailed across the sky on its singleminded quest to greet the horizon, streaming unabated through the open windows on the fifth floor apartment. It was the perfect light to work in as Bucky moved about the kitchen preparing dinner. There was something soothing about cooking. It was his personal meditation. He didn’t have to think about what ailed him in his life at the moment, his mind distracted in the task at hand. It was creation, making something delectable out of whatever raw ingredients they had on hand. 

 

Yet he couldn’t seem to shake what Wanda had said to him earlier. Why couldn’t he seem to quit the “brooding,” as she had called it, and just live his life. Plenty of people had it harder than him, he was sure of it. He just couldn’t seem to stop himself from wallowing in an endless spring of his own self-pity. And there was really only one reason to be found for it. Love. Everyone around him was moving forward, building a life and future that so often involved falling in love. Something that seemed wholly unobtainable to Bucky. He knew what the world expected of him and he knew what he craved; secretly, deep down under the layers of skin, muscle, and bone where he kept the kernel of truth caged in his heart. 

 

“I think a storm is coming,” Peggy announced. 

 

In her nightgown now, her favorite stuffed elephant tucked under one arm—a parting gift from Papa—and her stencil set under the other, Bucky hoped she might stay that way forever, carefree and innocent. She joined Bucky at the countertop and settled in for some sketching. Bucky’s eyes flickered to the windows expecting to see dark clouds amassing in the distance. Instead he saw a sky glowering orange from the setting sun. Then he heard it, a distant rumble of thunder. It roiled on and on for a solid minute, almost disappearing among the sounds of the city that filtered up from the street below. It was an ominous thunder and struck a chord of fear in Bucky’s chest.

 

“Let’s close all the windows now, lest we forget tonight and wake up with a flooded house.”

 

That night Bucky dreamt of soft blue eyes as vibrant as the waters of the Mediterranean. He dove into them like an olympic diver, purposeful and full of grace, knowing the waters as if they were the home where he belonged. There was no danger here. He was safe—

 

_BOOM._

 

Bucky’s eyes snapped open and his body sprang upright. It was not yet dawn, but the smolder of an early sunrise lit the room when there should be nothing but darkness. 

 

_BOOM_. Another explosion rattled the room. The old chandelier in the living room tinkled like a wind chime. The window panes shook and a hail of paint chips dislodged from the ceiling. That was no thunder nor an encroaching storm. Bucky’s ears strained to pick out other sounds. A sick sense of dread prickled at his brow among the sweat beaded there. Was it another bombing raid?

 

A scream pierced the air and sunk into Bucky’s chest like a hot dagger. Racing to the window Bucky threw apart the curtains and laid eyes upon a city under siege. Great fires burned in the distance, lighting the early morning sky with a great angry red like the mouth of an active volcano. Gunfire cracked in the distance. The boom of artillery shelling some unknown location traveled across the city like angry firecrackers and, to the right, marching down the main boulevard in the direction of the Hôtel de Ville—the seat of local government— were row after row of tanks and Nazi soldiers, wrathful red banners marked with the swastika parading down French streets. The roar of engines like the scream of terrible war-faring giants erupted from the sky as German fighter jets blitzed the Parisian skyline.

 

France had fallen. The Maginot line did not hold like promised. The Germans were here.


	2. The Occupation

**Chapter Two - The Occupation**

 

At first all Parisians seemed in agreement that they would stay home for the day. The city came to a stand still, save for the rumble of diesel trucks as they rolled down the avenues unloading hoards of Nazi soldiers into the heart of our city. They were flooding us with all the flashy contraptions of their war might and Paris cowered in its frightening shadow. 

 

Hunkered in the living room with all of their blankets and pillows on the old couch, Bucky waited with Peggy for the end to arrive. His hand clenched around a kitchen knife tucked under one of the cushions, ready to end any Nazi that dared set foot in their home. 

 

None ever came. And Paris soon realized it could not hold its collective breath forever. Life had to continue if they wished to survive. 

 

The next morning Bucky went about his usual routine, dropping Peggy off at the corner with her friend Marceline’s Maman for the walk to school while he headed out to deliver the morning papers around town with the hope he might learn more. Was rescue coming? Would the army return and with it Papa?

 

Life resumed, but it was changed. Many Parisian’s had fled the city before it was too late under the cover of night, but million’s more were now trapped. Bucky walked in a surreal dreamscape. The world was changed in the blink of an eye, yet the streets were the same. This was the home he had always known, but it was different. He diverted from his usual route to pass by the Hôtel de Ville, a fist clamped round his heart in the hopes he might find a base of resistance, a sign they were not forsaken. Instead it was a sinkhole opened in the earth below his feet, a plummeting sensation of distress as he found large swastika banners draped over the front of the building, marring the beautiful renaissance architecture with fascist ideology. 

 

Nazi soldier hustled about the grounds in front of the seat of local Parisian government, plundering its wealth and perverting it's meaning. Bucky scurried past. He did not want to be caught staring. In his haste he did not see the man before him and slammed into his solid chest.

 

“Pardon moi, Monsieur,” Bucky quickly apologized before the words died on his tongue when he caught sight of the man before him. He was a German soldier. A high ranking one by the amount of decorations adorned to his crisp uniform. 

 

“Guten tag, young man.” The soldier’s dark eyes scrutinized Bucky from head to toe. He stood defiantly tall. The man had a roguish smile; it was attractive and deeply unsettling. There was something in his nebulous stare, something Bucky couldn’t quite decipher. It left a cold damp feeling in his stomach.

 

“Je suis désolé,” Bucky’s eyes held no remorse as he stared down the officer. 

 

“Think nothing of it, my boy." His German accent was thick, but his words clear and precise. “What brings you out so early? Shouldn’t a boy your age be sleeping in, shirking the chores his mother begs him to do on this lovely day?”

 

“My Maman is dead, Sir, and I'm not a boy.” 

 

“Oh most unfortunate, and a boy you are not _._ ” His eyes raked over Bucky like hot coals.

 

Bucky bristled at the word again, the rage welling inside him, but there was no outlet. He had to do as the man wanted, despite the visions of driving the switchblade he had in his pocket repeatedly into the man’s soft belly. There was a contingent of Nazi soldiers just across the plaza. Bucky would never make it out alive. So he clamped down on the hate and stepped towards the German.

 

“Look at you, I see that fire in your eyes, I know it well,” His hands rested on either of Bucky’s shoulders and gripped like iron clamps. He tried not to wince. “You would do well with learning to control it. Fire like that is wild, unpredictable. It can turn on you in an instant and destroy everything you love. Douse the flame, _my boy_ , and submit.”

 

Unsure of what he wanted from Bucky he averted his eyes and slowly bowed his head. The soldier’s hands left his shoulders and a calloused finger gripped his chin, lifting it back up into his line of sight.

 

“What’s your name?”

 

Bucky worked to suppress a shudder. He wouldn’t admit how terrified he truly was. What did he want from Bucky?

 

“I do not enjoy repeating myself.”

 

“James Buchanan Barnes.”

 

“Oh dear, what a tragically American name,” His fingers moved from Bucky’s chin, but the cold pressure of them lingered. “Don’t tell me your mother gave it away to some filthy American during the Great War? Tsk tsk. But I promise not to hold it against you… Now scamper off before I'm forced to detain you under suspicion of treason against the state.”

 

Released from the German’s grips Bucky didn’t waste the opportunity given and raced as fast as his long legs could take him until he was far from sight of the Nazi banners, the collapsed government, and all its stomping soldiers. Yet the more he wandered around Paris doing his deliveries, the more he found changed. Shops that had been open just a day before shuttered, apartments abandoned, the typical congestion of cars and people absent from the morning rush. And worst of all was when he stepped onto the expansive green lawn of the Champs de Mars and saw the Eiffel Tower at the opposing end in all its sublime glory crushed beneath a proud Nazi flag. 

 

Bucky’s home had been stolen from him in the night. 

 

The France he had known all his life was no more.

 

*******

 

A chorus of morning doves sang from the tops of buildings, their song carried through the dense packed neighborhoods easily as the city’s alarm system. The sounds of nature so present in the city were a startlingly new experience for Bucky in the beginning. Now it was all he heard. Whether it were side streets or main boulevards, there was a strained silence like a tight film stretched over the city. Any noise that pierced it and drew the attention of others, friend or foe, made one suspicious. They were plagued by a constant sense of dread over the possible calamitous. It tainted everything, until it was all they could taste in their morning toast and evening cigarette. 

 

It was mid-morning, ration shopping done and stores closed with their stocks swiftly depleted for the day, when Bucky quietly made his way down a shadowed alley, cigarette in hand. The smell of cat piss and human filth only lightly tempered by the sheer winter cold. After their first winter under occupation, the French quickly learned it could always get worse. The supply shortages of petrol and food imports hit the civilians hardest as the German’s plundered what was available for themselves and left table scraps for the rest. The population was starving, especially those in dense urban areas and there was little Bucky could do about it, especially after he lost his job. There was no need now for truthful reporting and even less of a need for a paper delivery boy.

 

“Bucky?” A nervous voice called from the other end of the alley.

 

“Oui,” He husked back, a plume of steam and smoke expelled from his lungs into the frigid air.

 

Wanda stepped into the shaft of light dividing the alley and the dark circles like bruises under her eyes were brought into stark relief before Bucky. He cringed at the sickly pallor to her skin. Behind her was a large poster urging anyone who saw a downed Allied pilot to report them to the Gestapo. Bucky scoffed at such a thought. The night before he remembered the tell-tall rattle of the chandelier waking him at home, signifying another skirmish of fighter jets had taken place near the city.

 

“Thank heavens, you’re late.”

 

“I’m sorry,” He snuffed out the cigarette on the cold brick building beside him “The lines were extra long today. And still they ran out before a quarter of us made it through.”

 

Stumbling to unbutton his coat with numb gloved fingers he withdrew from the lining a package of cured meats, a pitiful bundle of carrots, and two packs of cigarettes. 

 

“Oh Bucky I can’t take this, it’s too much. Just the meat will do.”

 

Bucky shook his head and pressed upon her all the goods, “Non, they’re for you. I’m lucky I don’t have to worry as much about food as the rest of you.”

 

Wanda stared at Bucky and then lunged forward, drawing him into a crushing hug. He was startled by the display of affection, but quickly adjusted and hugged back. It felt good to hold someone in his arms and be held. They lingered in the embrace, feeding off the others warmth and raw need. When Wanda pulled back there was a well of unshed tears in her eyes that she swallowed back.

 

“You are our guardian angel, James. I don’t know what my family would do without you. How did you even manage to get these cigarettes? This could get us petrol for weeks.”

 

Bucky’s cheeks heated, but he brushed aside the praise. Eighteen months ago he never could have predicted how dire the situation would become for the Maximoff’s. The cascade of anti-Jewish laws passed by the Nazi’s almost made his head spin how fast they came down. Now they were not even allowed to own a business and Wanda’s parents were struggling to provide for her and her baby brother. It was a no brainer that Bucky would risk life and limb to help put food on their table.

 

“He has so many of them stored in his closet he’ll never notice if a few a month go missing.”

 

“ _Le Capitaine_?” Wanda whispered, scandalized. “He’ll kill you and Peggy if he finds out. You must be careful.”

 

“I am _always_ careful, but I won't sit by and watch you freeze and starve. Besides, he’s barely ever around.”

 

Bucky didn’t like talking about that man, let alone admitting the danger he faced daily in his presence. If he was forced to confront it he would have to admit how reckless much of his behavior had become as the occupation progressed and that he could not do. His resistance was all that kept him going while the French submitted like dogs to the mongrels that came to rape and pillage their land. Luckily for the Barnes’s the war kept the Captain away for weeks at a time.

 

“You look out for us and who watches your back?”

 

“I’ve got my own back, you needn’t worry.”

 

The withering look Wanda gave Bucky told him she was not convinced, but also in no place to argue. If she was caught with any of this on her walk home by the SS or Gestapo she would be accused of thievery and never seen again. Who knew where they disappeared them too, but rumors were rampant over the awful fate that awaited. It made Bucky’s gut twist in worry. To the left of the announcement about downed pilots was a propaganda poster of a villainous Jew with a crooked nose and a sack of stolen jewels tossed over his back. It was cartoonishly absurd. And yet, people he once thought of as kind and tolerant were now closing their shops to jewish families and kicking them out of their homes. What was the world coming to?

 

“I miss our coffee dates,” Wanda sighed and rubbed at her red nose, the cold settling in too deep. It was anything but crooked.

 

Bucky leaned forward, his forehead resting atop hers. Somewhere someone screamed. They jerked apart, anxious, but used to such cries and the knowledge they’d probably never know its source.

 

“Stay safe and I'll see you soon, oui?”

 

“Of course, au revoir,” Wanda pressed a kiss to each cheek and hurried from the alley, all her contraband carefully tucked in the thick fur of her coat.

 

Bucky took the long way home. Detouring through side streets he knew would skirt check points and avoid detection by most of the occupiers save for those patrolling their designated beats.

 

Eighteen months and there was still no end in sight to the Nazi occupation. Now deep in their second winter of the invasion hope was long stomped out under the heavy press of the German Army’s boot against the delicate throat of Paris. The Vichy government in southern France—“zone-libre”as they called it—was a sham, a puppet government for Hitler. The French police worked hand-in-hand with the SS and Gestapo to help enforce the Nazi’s cruel laws and were instrumental in the rounding up of undesirables.

 

No where was safe. And it made Bucky furious. Was there no resistance? Did no one care to fight back against the beasts in their homeland? It sure felt that way and was the reason of Bucky’s detour. He was scouting for the best possible locations where he could leave resistance graffiti. Something the people would see and know they weren’t alone. He’d taken to this form defiance a couple months ago after a particularly rough night with their house guest. 

 

The current detour brought him by a shuttered pre-school covered in Nazi propaganda fliers and more warnings about the dangers of Allied pilots. It was near a catholic church, the perfect place to plant some graffiti that would be seen by all the French who still made their weekly pilgrimage to Sunday mass. An involuntary scoff escaped his lips at the idea of getting on his knees for some man in the clouds. If he were real he would have answered their prayers for help by now. He would have answered Bucky’s long before that.

 

Digging around in the lining of his coat Bucky plucked from within a thick black marker and brought it down on the nearest flier. It was a black and white image of a Nazi hoisting a kid onto his shoulders. It read “Trust the German Soldiers.” Screw that.

 

The black marker cut a wide swath across the image when his arm was suddenly snagged in a vice-like grip. 

 

“ _What on earth are you doing_?”

 

Bucky’s stomach dropped out from under him. He jerked, twisting his free arm to grab for his switchblade. He would not go down without a fight. But they were quicker and grabbed that arm too, maneuvering it behind his back, face mashed against the wall, wrist twisted until he gasped in pain and dropped the blade. 

 

Breathing furiously into the cold brick Bucky waited for the cuffs to lock in place around his wrists and seal his fate. Instead he was released.

 

“Mon dieu, in broad day light too,” The woman’s Russian accent finally registered in Bucky’s ears and he realized he was no longer in mortal danger. Slowly he turned to face his neighbor.

 

“What the hell?” His eyes were ablaze with betrayal. Natasha Romanov didn’t even blink. If he thought he exuded a look of ‘don’t fuck with me,’ the surly Russian exuded an air of impenetrable confidence. She was unshakable. 

 

“You idiot. You oaf. You will get yourself killed!” Natasha laid into him, stealing the marker from his hand and giving him a stiff wack with it. “What would you do if I had been an SS agent? Think of your sister.” 

 

“What are you, a nazi sympathizer?”

 

Natasha’s eyes narrowed, “Watch your tongue, child.”

 

“I am eighteen, a grown adult!”

 

“I’ll believe that when I see one. You’re reckless, endangering your sister, and going to get caught. What would your father think?”

 

“This is war, everyone’s in danger. And I think he’d be proud that I'm actually doing something unlike the rest of you content to sit on your lazy asses and let these Nazi bastards take _everything_.”

 

“Go home to your sister, keep her warm, and let the adults do the resisting.”

 

Natasha tossed his pen at his feet and stood before him with arms crossed, her red hair like an ignited flair in the cold barren streets of Paris. Yet it provided no warmth to Bucky as he bent to pick up the pen. He inspected the street—end to end—careful to study all the windows on the building across the way, only now realizing how incredibly careless he had been. Anyone could have seen what he was doing. Anyone could have been watching.

 

He pocketed the pen and shoved past Natasha. He hurried from the school grounds, past an endless row of red posters emblazoned with the Swastika and scrawled across the bottom in thick black text the words: “Our Calm Future.” 

 

***

 

“Hallo Barnes’s.” 

 

The door swung inward and the deep bellowed greeting froze Bucky in place at the kitchen stove where he worked. He never knew when to expect the man’s return, and even if he did, it never lessoned the spike of fear in his veins. 

 

“Hauptstrumfüror Rumlow, you’re back early.” 

 

Brock Rumlow sauntered into the kitchen, dropping his bags on the floor by Bucky’s feet. He would have to put those away for him later.

 

The German officer came behind Bucky, placed his hands on Bucky’s shoulders and squeezed. Bucky’s eyes remained vacant and detached, staring out across the room towards the windows and the grey skies beyond. Bucky had long grown used to the man’s friendly mannerisms, which he used in heavy dosages to mask the deadly venom flowing just beneath the surface.

 

_“_ Ah, yes, my favorite. Perhaps you were expecting me after all?” Bucky could hear the whistle of his nostrils as they inhaled the simmering meat. “Hasis parmentier _—“_

 

“ _Hachis_ parmentier,” Bucky corrected.

 

“Hachis—yes, thank you,” There was no gratitude in his voice, just cold calculations as his hands bit into Bucky’s shoulder blades before detaching as he shuffled around the counter. “I come with the gift of news—a resolution of sorts if you will. And this.”

 

Something heavy landed on the counter. Bucky’s eyes finally moved to meet Rumlow’s; curious, then down to the package on the counter. It was a new coat, not big enough for Bucky’s wide shoulders so he knew it had to be for Peggy, who had outgrown her coat last winter and suffered a bad case of pneumonia this Christmas for it. Bucky had never been so terrified in his life.

 

“What do you say?”

 

“Danke,” Bucky lowered his head obediently, neck muscles tensed in fierce protest at his subservience. Every time he lowered his head in deference to Rumlow, the Nazi Captain that had requisitioned their apartment soon after the occupation, Bucky tasted the tickle of bile in the back of his throat. He hated this man. Hated what he stood for and the constant reminder he provided daily that they were not free. They were prisoners and he their prison guard.

 

Bucky felt hostage in his own home, but there was no fighting it, not when it brought food to his table and warm coats for Peggy when so many others went hungry and cold.

 

“What is the news?”

 

“I shall share it with you and Peggy after dinner. First I shall clean up.”

 

While Rumlow settled in Bucky busied himself with the task at hand. Since Brock Rumlow had occupied their apartment Bucky had felt him slowly being groomed by the officer into something he didn’t quite understand. When he found out Bucky could cook he demanded all his meals be prepared and ready by seven every evening, which Bucky had learned the hard way meant preparing the meal even if he was out of town, because if he came back unexpectedly like tonight and there was no dinner ready a price would be exacted. Usually the destruction of extra ration cards that allowed Bucky to purchase more than most Parisians—and allowed him to smuggle food to the Maximoff’s without going hungry himself. But sometimes the threat of violence flared into harsh reality with a slap to the face (SS ring turned inwards to leave angry welts for days), always in the presence of his younger sister. 

 

On top of the meals he had to cook, he was also expected to launder the officer’s clothes, clean his room, and tend to his every need like an obedient housewife. No matter how much it boiled Bucky’s blood to be in service to a Nazi like Rumlow he knew it was better than the alternative: watching the bones grow more pronounced in Peggy's cheek with each passing week as they starved; letting the heat flicker out as the petrol shortage worsened. _Non_ , he would carry this burden himself to spare Peggy. He knew those hungry eyes in Rumlow could demand so much worse as his sister entered womanhood.

 

Peggy and Bucky ate their meal in dutiful silence with Rumlow. Dinner had always been an eventful affair when Papa was home. They’d talk rapid-fire over the other for his attention. The laughter was a distant memory now. Rumlow demanded strict silence at dinner the table. 

 

Tonight he wanted to speak.

 

“I have found your Father.”

 

The silence around the table grew more pronounced and ached with an unbearable tension Bucky didn’t dare break. His eyes flickered to Peggy—spoon dangling limp before her open mouth—then back to Rumlow. He sat there with a satisfied grin smeared across his angular jaw, savoring the moment it seemed. 

 

“Papa? Where is he? Is he coming home?” Peggy finally spoke up, the hopeful rise of her voice almost painful to Bucky’s ears.

 

“I’m afraid he won't be coming home,” There was no remorse in his eyes, just an icy stare. “I ran your inquiry up the chain of command in Germany about your father and they informed me upon the French army’s surrender he was sent with his platoon to a POW camp in Essen, but unfortunately succumbed to his wounds on the journey.”

 

“I don’t…” Peggy looked around frantically, slow to comprehend the Nazi’s words. But Bucky understood. The food in his stomach turned to stone and his head spun. 

 

“He’s dead, my dear. Sent to meet the Almighty Creator for judgement. If he’s a good man you will see him again one day, I am sure.”

 

Silverware clattered against Maman’s china. Bucky was on his feet. He couldn’t breath. He was suffocating under Rumlow’s oppressive stare. This wasn’t how it should have been done, but Rumlow knew that. He wanted to deliver the news the way he did so they knew who was in control. He was all they had left. He was what kept them fed, clothed, and warm while so many countless others suffered. And now they knew there would be no Papa to come home and save them.

 

“Bucky, please don’t be dramatic, this is what you wanted, to know the truth.”

 

Bucky backed away from the table, fists clenched tight. There was such a vicious swirl of emotions inside him he wasn’t sure if he would launch over the table at Rumlow and beat him to death with his obscene nazi beer stein or crumple to the floor. Instead he sat down, the nauseous concoction of emotions simmering just beneath the surface. He reached out towards Peggy and her hand immediately grasped his, feeding each other the comfort and strength they needed to survive this moment. He squeezed her smaller hand in his, wishing a million times over they were alone, that this wasn’t the real world, but it was and there was a vile man witness to their grief. Rumlow resumed enjoying his meal to their disbelief.

 

Later that night—long after he put Peggy to bed and stayed with her until her cries carried her off to a fitful sleep—when he was sure Rumlow was in his room and deep asleep, Bucky put on his coat and boots, and snuck out. 

 

As soon as he was out of the building and his feet touched the side walk he ran. He knew it was dangerous, reckless as Natasha would lambast him for, but he didn’t care. He didn’t care about the bloody curfew and he didn’t care about the Gestapo roving the streets hunting for resistance fighters and downed Allied pilots. All he cared about was the slam of his heel on icy pavement as he pounded his way down side-streets and through darkened jardens. He was running as far and as fast as his legs could carry him, consequences be damned. He just had to get out of that apartment. Papa’s apartment where he brought Maman home, where both he and Peggy were born, and now were Brock Rumlow slept most nights plotting the systematic destruction of everything he’s known. 

 

Somehow Bucky avoided detection. He ducked down shadowed alleys and narrow footpaths that twisted their way through the dense urban jungle. For forty five minutes he ran until he thought his lungs might pop and the stitches in his side burst like the weak seams of Peggy’s stuffed elephant popped under the constant pressure of her hugs. Buckled over with his hands on his knees, Bucky regained his composure. Despite the bitter cold Bucky’s brow was beaded with sweat. 

 

There was a cafe down the street, Bucky could hear the boisterous laughter of soldiers enjoying their evening meals and drinks, all the while Parisian’s cowered in their homes for curfew eating table scraps. It was too much. The constant threat of violence permeated every facet of Bucky’s life anymore and the strain of always being on edge was driving him mad. There was nothing he could do. Nothing anyone would let him do.

 

It was foolish to be out this late. The clink of glasses and silverware wafted down the side-street. Bucky was too visible, exposed. He ducked into the shadows and headed away from the noise in the direction of home. This time he paid more attention to his surroundings and realized how lucky he had been to make it so far. The thought of the journey home instilled a sense of dread in Bucky. Every noise set him on edge. The doleful howl of a stray dog. The crunch of days old snow underfoot. A few times he was convinced he was being followed and threw himself into the nearest shrub or behind a tree, heart lodged in his throat like a hand at his neck. The Nazi’s were looking for something, but it wasn’t him. A search party could be heard one block over. Dogs whimpering, harsh german syllables, flashlight beams crisscrossing light sword fights in the dark.  _Mon Dieu._ Bucky hurried onward.

 

He was near the Sienne, and closing in on home, when his ears caught hold of a sound in the trembling darkness. The scrape of a boot. The quiet rustle of leaves parted. Bucky froze. Only his eyes moved about, scanning the length of the sidewalk to his right and the river bank to his left. Nothing revealed itself. He turned to scout the road behind him and saw it. Or something. A movement. A shadow where there should be none. Bucky’s chest constricted. This was it. Nazi soldiers were about to pour out from hidden crevices, rifles trained on him, and he’d never be seen again. Peggy would have lost both Papa and her brother in the course of one night.

 

A minute passed with Bucky glued to the sidewalk. None came. He swallowed down his fear and stepped towards the shadow. It was a dark and cloudy night, not enough light to define the shadow. It was just a bulbous blur that disfigured the narrow trunk of the tree behind which a man was crouched.

 

“Merde,” Bucky swore.

 

It was no Nazi soldier. He pressed in upon the man slowly, hands raised to signal he meant no harm. The man was trembling, slumped against the graceful bow of a Linden tree trunk. He shuffled backwards until he collided with the wall of the closed down confiserie behind him. Bucky felt a thrill of realization when he spotted the flight suit he wore. This was a pilot! An American pilot by the AAF logo stamped on the shoulders of his uniform.

 

“Anglais?”

 

The pilot was pale, almost blue. How long had he been hiding out here? Was this whom the Nazi’s were scouring the streets for? Were there more pilots like him from the skirmish the night before? Bucky had to do something. His conscience wouldn’t allow him to leave the man.

 

“I’m an ally, I promise. I only want to help,” Bucky implored the man to believe him, searching his shadowed eyes for a sign he would accept his help. The man gave a curt nod, fear dispelled as easily as if it were shrugging of a winter coat. Then he pushed off the wall only for his leg to give out. Bucky lunged forward and caught him, shouldering the brunt of the man's weight on his left side.

 

“You’re hurt!” The trousers on the pilot’s left leg were shredded and raw mangled flesh was visible beneath. It looked like bloody bits of beef jerky. Bucky blanched. “Put your weight on me, I live only a few blocks from here. We must hurry.”

 

The blonde haired man stared at Bucky with unbelieving eyes, squared jaw clenched. He had abandoned all hope it seemed before Bucky found him. He would not let this man give up. He hefted the pilot’s right arm over his shoulder and then set off for home one sturdy step at a time.

 

“Th-thank y-y-you,” The man’s teeth clattered through his speech he was so cold, but Bucky still managed to detect the hint of an American accent. “I-I’m S-steve R-r-rogers, it’s a p-p-pleasure to make y-your acquaintance.”

 

Bucky rolled his eyes, American’s and their ‘manners’. 

 

“Oui, oui, we’ll talk once you’re safe. My name is James,” He gave Steve a toothy grin, shifting his weight around. “But you can call me Bucky.”

 

“O-okay, Bucky, I’m w-with you, to the end of the line.”


	3. The Pilot

Chapter Three - The Pilot

The sun was out for the first time in what felt like months. They'd been buried under cloudy grey skies so long the feel of sunlight on skin was almost like a hit of morphine. Paris seemed more alive today than in recent memory. Perhaps it was just the German’s enjoying the first bit of sun. Maybe it was actual Parisian’s testing their toes outdoors, emboldened by the light. Maybe it didn’t matter, because Bucky had a mission now. A purpose. He would defy the Nazi regime by harboring a fugitive, an American Pilot downed in the never ending stream of air skirmishes taking place over France. His resistance graffiti seemed so insignificant now.

There were only two windows in the attic, an oval shaped piece of stained glass—which they had to climb in through in the dead of night with Steve’s mangled ankle—and a skylight positioned on the ceiling over a tattered old couch, its soft velvet frayed bare in patches. Bucky’s arm’s were still sore with the strain of pushing the solidly built American through the open window. Now he was fast asleep on the ratty couch, snoring softly, nestled among a pile of blankets. The attic was cramped with old knick knacks, antiques; items long forgotten by the tenants below. Bucky had discovered this space as a child—it was only accessible by climbing out Bucky’s window onto the fire escape, then up the ladder to the oval window which doubled as a doorway.

As a child the room had seemed so much larger, a vast labyrinth through which Bucky could explore time and space. He had spent many afternoons letting his imagination run wild in the shadowed space creating forts and staging epic battles between pirates at sea. It had been ages since he’d been up here. He had almost forgotten of its existence until the Nazi’s came and in a moment of foresight he managed to stash the family radio, some of Maman’s jewelry (that he hadn’t hawked for food and oil), and Papa’s library of books (his favorites and literary classics alike).

Now, added to the stash of contraband was the American, and Bucky couldn’t help but beam as he looked upon the sleeping man. Today he felt like he had accomplished something of worth. He saved this man’s life. Got him off the streets and successfully hid him from the roving Gestapo and SS. He was imbued with a sense of pride, it surged through his system like static electricity, tickling awake all his senses. This man had said he was with him, to the end of the line. Bucky would make sure they never reached that end.

The small gas lamp beside the couch was the only other source of light in the cold dark attic besides what little filtered in from the windows. Bucky wished he could provide more warmth for the man, he was sure to face some tough cold nights up here. But it was all Bucky could provide.

Steve’s breaths came in shallow wheezes. It was a pitiful sound coming from such a handsome specimen. His face was defined by a strong jawline dusted with a light stubble of blonde hairs, a perfectly proportioned nose under which two rosy lips vibrated with his wheezes. His biceps were massive and Bucky tried to avoid staring, but he couldn’t help it. His eyes were drawn to the man. He was unlike any man Bucky had seen before. He only wished he would awaken so Bucky could see those warm blue eyes again in the light of day. There was something in them, something familiar, like greeting an old friend.

“Where are we?" A weak voice croaked and Bucky jumped upright, almost slamming his head against the wooden beams of the low vaulted ceiling.

“The attic of my apartment building, in Le Marais. Here,” Bucky proffered a glass of water he had brought up with him along with the torn half of a loaf of French bread and a small bowl of hot chicken broth. It wasn’t much, but it had to do.

“Thanks…” He hesitantly took the food, eyes surveying his surroundings with mistrust before he settled in on the food and seemed to lose sight of all else.

Steve ate slowly, careful not to waste a crumb of bread or drop of broth, “This is superb.”

Bucky smiled to himself, “Hunger is the best sauce." And it seemed, the best way to earn a man's trust.

"Here," Bucky held out the stack of neatly folded clothes. "I’ve got a change of clothes for you, they were my father’s. He was close to your size so I hope it fits.”

Bucky carefully deposited them at Steve’s side. “But first we need to clean your wound.”

“Ah _heck_ , I had to ditch my first aid kit back at the crash site! It was too bulky and the contents rattled about noisily when I moved. That would have been useful now.”

Steve stared down the length of the couch at his left leg propped up on the arm of the couch. He seemed to grow paler at the sight of it, deeply disturbed by the open wounds wrapped around the length of his ankle as if it had personally done him an offense.

“Not a problem, I’ve got some clean cloth and boiled water here to wash it before I attempt to stitch it up. I’m not the best with a needle and thread, so I apologize in advance, but if we don’t clean and close it you'll never heal.”

After carefully washing Steve’s calf muscle, ankle, and foot clean Bucky pulled out his sister’s sewing kit—once Maman’s—and worked to thread the needle. He cursed in frustration as he struggled to thread it. Finally on his fifth try he succeeded and snorted in triumph. Steve chuckled before hissing in pain as Bucky pierced his flesh without warning.

“Holy crow!”

“I’m sorry, best to do these things without warning. No sense in prolonging the agony.”

Bucky took a deep breath to firm his resolve, Steve’s leg carefully propped atop his lap. He was out of his league here. The flesh and muscle of Steve’s lower leg was a shredded mess. Bucky suppressed the urge to gag at the visible sight of white bone beneath the separated skin. He worked as fast as his hands could to stitch the haphazard slashes in the skin shut, careful to wash away the blood as it built up so he could see. The whole time Steve watched him closely, teeth gritted and steely eyes trained on the needle as it wove through his flesh.

“I think that does it,” Bucky gingerly moved Steve’s leg aside so he could slip from beneath it. Then he proceeded to help change Steve into his father’s clothes. They just barely fit. The shirt stretched taut over the large pectoral muscles of Steve’s. Even with thickly knitted sweater over top his pecs still protruded. When it came time to put on his pants, Bucky fought furiously against the flush of his cheeks as he helped slide off the rest of his pilot’s jumpsuit and slip him into Papa’s old khakis.

“You were cut through to the bone. I have no idea how long it will take to heal, I’m afraid you might be here for a bit.”

“I’m not afraid. Not when I’ve got a guardian angel watching over me.” Steve repurposed the grimace on his face into a cheery smile for Bucky’s benefit.

“Some guardian angel you’ve got, you should tell it next time you’d be better off if it kept your plane in the air.”

Bucky shifted uncertainly under Steve’s lingering stare, smile still genuinely planted on his face. Bucky could tell it fit there naturally. Steve was a genuinely positive force, something Bucky hadn’t experienced since the start of the war. They’d been under siege for so long Bucky had forgot how easily a simple smile could lift the spirit.

“You misunderstand, Bucky. You are the guardian angel.”

“Ha,” Bucky sputtered out a self-deprecating laugh, moving about to collect the bloodied clothes and dirtied water bowl. “So people keep saying. I’m anything but that.”

“Don’t be so quick to discredit yourself. Not many would do half of what you’ve already done.”

Steve shifted on the sofa to follow Bucky’s movements about the attic. Bucky couldn’t help but continue to feel self conscious under his stare.

“You’ve been mighty kind to me. I don’t know what to say or how to repay you,” All of Steve’s earnest sincerity was on display in the soft blue hues of his eyes, fixedly trained on Bucky.

“You don’t have to say anything, it is my duty to help.”

Steve’s mouth opened and closed, in surprise or he was chewing over his next words carefully, Bucky couldn’t tell. But he had to avert his stare, insecure under Steve’s all-consuming gaze.

“Who are you Bucky Barnes?” Steve studied him at length.

“No one. Just a child too young for the war when it started. Left among the wolves in our city and too weak to do anything about it.”

“I’d have to disagree, you look like neither a child nor weak. You’ve accomplished a great feat already. You saved my life. I would have frozen to death out there if you hadn’t found me or far worse if those wolves got me first.”

Steve beckoned for Bucky to join him on the couch. He waffled, indecisive. What if Rumlow came home early? But he knew the decision was already made for him. He wished to stay here all day and through the night learning everything he could about the mysterious American pilot and what was happening outside France. Steve’s voice put him at ease, like a salve to his raw nerves. So he sat in the space Steve had worked open for him, while repositioning his ankle so it was propped up on the small antique trunk before the couch.

Their shoulders were wedged together in their cramped confines and Bucky was overwhelmed by the warmth radiating from Steve’s body. He found himself selfishly interested in this man. He had so many questions, who knew when he’d have a Captain of the American Airforce in his attic again.

“What happened to you? What is happening outside? Is anyone coming to free us? Are you working with French resisters?”

“Woah, woah, one question at a time here.” But Steve’s subdued look told him all he needed to know. No one was coming. It didn’t matter what answers he gave, the fact remained the same. They were on their own.

“We were doing a bombing run on a nazi supply line just outside of Paris when a raid of German fighter pilots intercepted our squadron. I lost all my men before my engine was shot out and I crashed in some field.”

“You’re sure they’re all dead?”

“Yes,” Steve’s voice cracked near imperceptibly and if Bucky hadn’t been hanging on to his every word he might not have noticed it. “Only one managed to eject their parachute and he was… shot out of the sky. It was only cause I was able to land my plane in a field just outside the city I survived. This war isn’t going anyone’s way except Hitler’s at the moment.”

A somber silence fell over the dusty attic. Bucky’s ears focused on the slight wheeze to Steve’s breaths. He worried more might be wrong than just his leg. Would he soon join his squadron? Bucky thought of them, those faceless men who’s lives had been cut wickedly short because of greedy men in castles. He thought of the loss Steve must be feeling right now. Bucky new something of it.

“We heard that fight the other night, it woke my sister.” Bucky shifted away from Steve just to fill the void. The closeness and warmth had become too great a temptation to fight as a peculiar urge overtook his senses. He wanted to comfort this man.

“Every time she hears planes fly overhead she thinks its the end. It can take hours to calm her down again.”

“Where are your parents?”

Steve twisted his torso so he could face Bucky, closing some of the space he had opened. Bucky’s hands fidgeted restlessly in his lap. They had barely known each other half a day and this man was picking at his past like… like either he was being a good soldier learning all their was about his host and his surroundings or, preposterously, he actually cared.

“Maman died when I was young. Peggy’s birth was… complicated, she lived, but it weakened her. Only a few short years later she caught a bad bout of influenza going ‘round and…” Bucky shrugged, shoulders reaching for his earlobes. He didn’t know why he was opening up like this. He hated talking about Maman.

“Papa was at the front line when Germany invaded. I—I actually just found out he’ll never be coming home last night. It’s why I was out after curfew.”

A hand came to rest over Bucky’s as they wrung out the bottom of his sweater. He seized up under the touch and Steve quickly withdrew his hand.

“I’m sorry for your loss, it can’t be easy raising a sister in all of this…” Steve paused, chewing over something. “The world might not be doing so great right now, but I’m only here because I’m fighting. So don’t you give up. As long as their are good men like you we will make it through this.”

Blue eyes met equally blue eyes, surveying their depths to only find truth behind his words. Even though he barely knew this stranger his words offered more comfort than he had received in a long time like bringing water to a man long trapped in the desert.

In their silence the crack of intermittent gunfire could be heard in the distance. Bucky pulled off the couch and went to the window, but he could see nothing on the street below. It could have been anything, an accidental discharge or an assassination, Bucky’d never know. The reverberation of the door slamming shut downstairs shook dust loose from the rafters and a flood of panic sparked through Bucky’s system.

“Someone’s home.”

“Other than your sister?” Steve wondered.

“Our home has been requisitioned by a Nazi officer,” Bucky whispered as he rushed to collect Peggy’s sewing kit—she would lose her head if she discovered it missing.

“A Nazi?”

“Shhh! You mustn’t make a sound up here. I’m sorry. If he suspects anything we are all doomed. I must go now, I’m sorry, I will be back with more food once everyone I’m sure its safe. No sounds, please.”

Bucky felt guilty for having just dropped that on the man and running, but there was nothing to be done as Bucky scrambled out the window. Whomever was home mustn’t expect anyone else to be home, which he was thankful for as he carefully climbed down the ladder and in through his window. Once in his room he quietly kicked off his shoes, mussed his hair, threw on a robe, and walked out with a forced air of nonchalance.

The apartment was unnervingly quiet. Bucky tiptoed through the living room, past the kitchen, and down the opposing hall to the other bedrooms, Peggy’s and Papa’s (it would never be Rumlow’s). Both doors were shut leaving Bucky clueless as to whom had come home.

It wasn’t until the door on the left swung open to reveal Peggy that Bucky breathed a grateful sigh of relief. He really didn’t want to see Rumlow yet today. Not after the news he had imparted last night. Many nights he went to bed praying Rumlow would be killed in action on his next mission and never come home. Instead it was Papa who died a slow death from wounds inflicted by the very Nazi’s who’d stolen his home, his bookshop, and the country he loved so much he gave up America for. The very thought of it boiled his blood.

“Oh! I didn’t realize you were here,” Peggy halted before her brother.

“Désolé. I was napping,” Bucky noticed she was wrapped in a towel, on her way to the shower. He hadn’t realized how much she had developed in the last year and a half. Before the occupation started she seemed but a small child, yet now she was burgeoning into adulthood before his very eyes. It scared him something fierce. This was no world to grow up in, he would know. But there were particular dangers for a woman in a time of war. That terrified him more.

“Sorry I’ve interrupted. Go shower.”

Peggy studied him for a moment, her shrewd eyes quick to pick up on his quickened breath and flush. He hadn’t been napping, but she didn’t seem quite capable of figuring out why he was so on edge.

“Okay Bucky, you’re being weird, but I’m cold as a witch’s tit so I'm gonna shower now.”

“Jesus, Peggy, you've sure developed a filthy mouth.”

Her tongue blew raspberries his way before she stomped down the hall to the bathroom at the end and slammed the door shut. Bucky released his pent up breath in a giant gush. He didn’t know why he had been so nervous, but he knew Peggy could never find out about their guest upstairs. There was no way he would endanger her like that too. He had to play it cool. Shaking his shoulders loose he headed to the kitchen to start dinner prep.

Today he’d have to figure out how to make a little extra and hide it for later. While waiting for the pot to boil Bucky cut the potatoes. The old pipes hissed like snakes disturbed from slumber as the water rushed toward the bathroom. They were lucky the pipes hadn’t frozen this winter. The stream stuttered, inconsistent in pressure and availability. The strike of the stream on the porcelain tub and bath curtain reverberated down the hall intermingling with a wheezing cry that made Bucky think a pipe had burst. But when he moved closer to inspect he recognized the sound as deep, soul splitting sobs. The real world had shattered Peggy’s childly bubble and it lashed at Bucky like a lance aimed right at the heart. He wished he could be the big brother that knew how to comfort her, protect her from the pain war brought.

Instead he returned to his cooking with a renewed vigor. The one thing he did know how to do was cook and so he threw all his passion into crafting a meal that might provide the warmth and comfort Peggy needed. A potato leak soup that was a favorite of Maman’s and might nourish as well as offer a warm dose of nostalgia. Thankfully when Rumlow came home he requested his meal to be brought to Papa’s room, furiously scribbling in a black leather notebook without taking one glance at the Barnes’s. Bucky often wondered what kind of notes he kept in that little black book. Were they war plans? His personal diary?

He had tried once to rummage through Rumlow’s room to find it, hoping he might discern any information of use for the resistance. Not that he would know what to do with it if he indeed had found it. The resistance was as much a mystery to him as the mechanisms of the Nazi’s. And besides, Rumlow took it with him everywhere so there was no chance of that anyways.

Peggy ate the soup without comment. Bucky tried to stifle the disappointment when she said nothing of it. She was suffering over Papa’s death, nothing would taste good at the moment. He knew that, but still he had hoped to see a lift in spirits over the nostalgic meal.

When she finished and cleaned her dishes she went to her room to turn in early. Bucky followed.

“How—how're you doing?” Bucky asked from the doorway, unsure whether he should enter or even be asking.

Peggy paused, in the process of turning down her bedsheets. She dutifully made her bed each morning. Something she often lorded over Bucky and his disastrously messy room. It was a cold night, the windows fogged from the heat Rumlow had turned on. Bucky hoped it was leaching into the attic to warm Steve.

“I always knew there was a chance Papa might not come home,” Peggy slowly turned to look at Bucky and sat on her bed. “But when they came—“ Her hand flapped in Rumlow’s general direction, “I got distracted about his welfare for a bit, scared for us. But then so much time passed and we didn’t hear anything for so long about Papa all I had was the hope he was still out there. Fighting to get back to us. Now I realize how stupid that was. It’ll have been two years this summer since the invasion and he’s been dead almost all of it. I feel so childish.”

Bucky stepped towards her then faltered. Fuck, he wished he knew how Papa did it. He had such a beautiful way with words. It probably stemmed from his love of books. Bucky was tragically inept in comparison.

“You were a child, Peg. There’s nothing wrong with having hope.”

Her eyes locked on his. They were like ice—something, a resolution, frozen inside them. “I’m not anymore.”

They fell into a silence Bucky didn’t know how to break so he wandered her room and came upon a picture of the three of them—Bucky, Peggy, and Papa at Versailles—framed on her nightstand. Staring at it he felt a familiar tug at his heart. It was loss. Not just the loss of Papa, but of their family and happy times. Beside the nightstand, crammed into her trash basket was her favorite stuffed elephant.

“How are you doing so well after what Brock told us?”

“Hauptstrumfüror Rumlow, Peggy,” She knew better than to be so disrespectful—especially to him.

She rolled her eyes and waved me off flippantly, climbing under the covers now, “Fine, avoid the question.”

“I—I’m not,” Bucky claimed indignantly. “We just need to be careful Pegs, we have an actual officer of the Nazi regime living with us. I cannot think of a more dangerous situation.”

“He’s been here eighteen months, what makes you so worried now?”

Bucky didn’t have an answer he could give her so he gave her the one she wanted in the first place.

“You wanna know why I do not cry for Papa’s passing? Because I grieved it long ago. A few weeks after the occupation I accepted that he’d never come home. None of those soldiers captured would. There were many nights spent in bed paralyzed with a grief so heavy I thought I might never get back up. But then one day I remembered why Papa marched off to war in the first place, to protect our family. That’s what I’m going to do now, so please, don’t try pushing it with Rumlow. Okay?”

Peggy seemed to mull it over in her head before she nodded, “Bonne nuit, mon frère.”

“Dormez bien, ma sœur.”

The door clicked closed and Bucky leaned against it, contemplative. Across the hall was Papa’s room, light leaching out underneath the door signaling Rumlow was still up. He could hear the telltale scratch of quill pen to parchment. As long as he stayed in his room it might be safe. So Bucky gathered the leftover stew and hunk of half stale bread and climbed up to the attic. The air bit at Bucky’s exposed skin and his fingertips stuck to the icy metal railings.

It was only marginally warmer inside the attic and Bucky cringed in sympathy for Steve, bundled up tightly on the frayed couch, only his face visible in the dim light of the gas lantern.

“I have hot stew.”

“Hallelujah!” Steve cried out as he reached for the stew, warming his hands against the bowl.

“Quiet please,” Bucky whispered.

“Oh sorry.” Steve pretended to lock his mouth shut and tossed the key over his shoulder.

Bucky smiled and settled in next to Steve on the couch watching him eat. Even half frozen, starved, and injured he still ate with the utmost grace and civility. Bucky shook his head with a smile.

“What?” Steve asked, acutely self-aware as he wiped at his face for some type of mess.

“Nothing, you’re just so proper. If I was in your state I wouldn’t care what kind of mess I made.”

“Oh,” Steve chuckled and it warmed Bucky to hear. “My mother taught me to always mind my manners no matter the situation.”

Bucky let him finish his meal without anymore interruptions. He was content just to watch the American the rest of the night, but he knew he must head back to his room soon. There was plenty of time to get to know Steve. His injury was due to keep him holed up here for a while. Still Bucky couldn’t help but worry about the future, when he could carry his own weight. How was he supposed to get him out of the city when every Nazi soldier, sympathizer, and spy was on the lookout for Allied pilots. If they were caught Bucky and Peggy were sure to be executed and Steve tortured for information before his own eventual death. The danger felt so real in the quiet cold of the attic Bucky gave an involuntary shudder.

“Are you cold?” Steve asked as his arm slipped around Bucky’s shoulder and pulled him in. Bucky went completely stiff, but he didn’t pull away. Instead he turned into the man he barely knew, burying his face into the crook of his strong arms and felt the tears sting his eyes as they came fast and unbidden. He felt so silly crying in this stranger’s arms, like a child and that was the last thing he wanted to feel. He didn’t know this man, yet something about him invited Bucky to let down his guards and that was a dangerous thing.

Thankfully, Steve didn’t say a word, he just placed the finished bowl on the floor and wrapped his other arm around Bucky, massaging concentric circles into his back. He was too warm and welcoming, it only pushed more tears from Bucky’s eyes.

Steve would never know that Bucky cried for Papa as much as he cried for himself. The life he could never have, but wanted so desperately. To feel normal, to be able to have what everyone else had. But he knew the reality was he wasn’t meant for such things. He was different, broken, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

Eventually he cried himself to sleep in the American’s arms, the warmth of their combined body heat a furnace strong enough to fight off the bitter winter cold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for the delay, but I hope it was worth it for some Bucky/ Steve interaction? (finally!)


	4. The Infection

**Chapter Four - The Infection**

 

The sun cut through the portal window bright as the spotlights posted at military checkpoints all over the city, designed to disorient. To instill a childlike smallness in the passerby’s and the fear that something awful lurked in the inky blackness beyond. Bucky lifted his hands to his face, blocking the light, trying to bat away the confusion. Where was he? Dusty rafters overhead, frayed velvet beneath his palm; he was in the attic. He had slept through the night. _Merde_. Bucky surged upright and Steve’s arm slipped from atop his shoulder.

 

It had been another brutally cold night, Bucky remembered now. So cold he didn’t dare attempt to climb down the icy fire escape to his room. And if he was being honest with himself—which he outright refused to be—he didn’t want to leave Steve’s side. The American had seemed to be recovering well the first few days, but as the temperature dropped and a whiteout blizzard rolled in from the north his energy waned. Bucky was lucky to get a solid hour with him an evening. Most times he was dozing in and out, light of breath. 

 

The American was still asleep so Bucky took the time to appraise him. His jawline beaded with sweat, his typically soft and plump lips drained of color and cracked with dehydration. Bucky wished he didn’t know Steve’s body so well, to know such minor details as the natural pigmentation of his lips and the cowlick that grew in the opposite direction of his hair at the base of his neck, right side. He tried to convince himself it was useful. His analyzation revealed some key details about Steve’s health. And today the final conclusion wasn’t coming up well. 

 

Once downstairs Bucky began to make preparations in his head for a hearty dinner stew for Bucky’s fever, but there were so few options. The first winter of the occupation had been terrible food wise and now with the rations even stricter and imports all but nonexistent, there was little to be had for anyone. It was only when Rumlow brought home some of his own rations that they managed to eat well enough to not go to bed hungry. And now with feeding a secret fourth mouth, even after already trying to provide what he could to Wanda’s struggling family, added an extra strain to dinner making. He was barely treading water in a quickly rising flood.

 

The windows outside the apartment looked like a white curtain had been pulled shut across them, the outside world a static view of depthless white. There would be no rations to find today in this weather, he’d have to make do with what was left in the pantry. Thankfully Rumlow was already gone for the day when Bucky emerged from his room. It made sense for him to go to work, even on a day like today, but Bucky couldn’t seem to understand what Peggy was getting ready for. There would be no school in such a blizzard.

 

“Classes are surely canceled today, have you looked outside?”

 

Bucky appraised Peggy from the doorway to her room where she fastidiously laced up her knee-high boots. He wondered when she became so self-assured. Something had changed in her, a fire had been lit, and it propelled her down a path with purpose. It struck a chord of panic in his heart. Where would they end up, these paths they’d chosen?

 

“It is, I’m going to Marceline’s to study and help with household chores,” Peggy pulled on the large seal-lined jacket of Maman’s, giving off a startling resemblance to their mother, but it was the twitch of her nose that gave Bucky pause. It was her tell. She wasn’t being truthful. “Her maman has come down with pneumonia in this terrible weather so they need help.”

 

“Oh, well just be careful.” He could not dispute what sounded reasonably true.

 

“Oui, oui.” 

 

She brushed past Bucky into the hall and plucked her gloves from the counter. Bucky pushed aside any reasons she might be lying, he had more pressing matters residing just above their heads. She bid him a wave farewell and headed out the door.

 

A few hours later, while the broth simmered around the old chicken bones, there was a knock on the door. The ladle dropped from his hand into the pot and he jumped back to avoid the splash of boiling water, eyes latched on the door. Three more persistent raps rattled the door. 

 

“Coming!”

 

A quick survey of the apartment affirmed there was nothing incriminating in the open. Bucky wiped his hands against the apron before pulling the door open on Natasha Romanov, hand poised for another hammer on the door. 

 

“Mademoiselle Romanov, tout va bien?” Bucky opened the door fully, but took a wide stance to block her entry, surveying the hall behind her suspiciously. 

 

“Yes, everything is fine. Besides the unrelenting cold, hunger, and general malaise.”

 

A laugh escaped Bucky’s lips despite his unease. Her sharp delivery might distract most from the sarcasm embedded in her words, but Bucky could at least appreciate her wry humor. In return Natasha gave him the quirk of a smile.

 

“Is there something I can help you with? I’m in the midst of cooking…” He trailed off with a wave over his shoulder towards the kitchen. 

 

Natasha leaned in, eyes raking over the apartment, and it made Bucky feel exposed. He shifted his balance from foot to foot.

 

“Non. Actually I just wanted to drop by and check on you and your sister. Make sure you two were doing well. She informed me of your loss. I—I am sad to hear of it.”

 

“Merci beaucoup, it has been hardest for Peggy, but we are managing.” He did not wish to talk of Papa with her.

 

This was the second time this week she had dropped by unannounced with the intention of “checking in” on them. If she had been friends with his Papa before the war maybe he would have bought it, but not now. Not with everything going on.

 

“If you ever need anything…”

 

“It’s most generous of you to offer your assistance, but we are doing just fine.” Bucky moved his hand to the doorknob, ready to end this conversation. 

 

“Le capitaine is not here?”

 

The color drained from Bucky’s face. Was she a nazi spy? Rumors were rampant that they had infiltrated every layer of society. Before he let his fears run rampant he remembered, she meant the German not the American. Still his suspicions lingered. Why was she so interested in them?

 

“Non, thankfully. But one never knows when he might return.” There was a warning hidden in his words and Natasha didn’t miss it. 

 

“I see, and what of your sister?”

 

“Gone too, off to study or something. I don’t think she wanted to tell me the truth.”

 

Natasha seemed perturbed and their eyes locked. Something swarmed behind her dark brown eyes. A whole world apart from Bucky’s and fastidiously kept that way.

 

“Hm, well I wont intrude any longer, but if you ever—“ She bit off the rest of her words when a thump rumbled from the ceiling and the striped chandelier swayed. 

 

This time Bucky’s heart dropped into his stomach and triggered a spike of fear. _Steve_. Both their eyes swept the ceiling before Bucky gave Natasha an abashed smile and shrug, “Old building.”

 

“Indeed…” Natasha’s eyes lingered a beat too long on the ceiling.

 

“Well I must attend to the stew, if you’ll excuse me.” 

 

The door clicked shut on Natasha before she could respond and Bucky fell against it, breath expelled in a gush out his nostrils. If she was really a nazi spy Bucky was going to have tread even more carefully. Trust was in short supply nowadays.

 

“Merde, Steve!” Bucky cussed; something was wrong.

 

He scrambled to open the window in his bedroom, fingers slipping against the icy latch before they caught the grip. He lumbered out into the blizzard, breath instantly frosted on the air, icy crystals catching in his throat and making him cough. He slipped twice on the frozen steps before throwing his body through the attic port-hole. The air inside wasn’t much warmer, but somehow still managed to smell like the interior of those old bathhouses for men, musky and sour.

 

Steve was in a huddled mass of pillows and blankets on the floor by the couch. A beam of light shot down from the skylight above like a spotlight on Steve’s crumpled form. Bucky sprang forward to help him up, throwing an arm around his shoulder and lifting him back onto the couch haphazardly. Steve was mumbling incoherencies and shivering like the sails of a boat in a thunderstorm.

 

“Steve? Steve can you hear me?” Bucky gave him a light shake on the shoulders as he readjusted him upright on the couch. But Steve gave no indication he heard Bucky, his head lolling from side-to-side as he mumbled out words Bucky could only assume had to do with piloting. 

 

“Mayday, mayday, CAG is hit…”

 

“Steve, I need you to focus, look at me,” Bucky grasped Steve’s face in both hands and held it still, willing him to look Bucky in the eyes.

 

“Cherubs five, Cherubs three, mayday!”

 

The soft ocean blue of Steve’s eyes were glossy and unfocused and refused to settle on Bucky’s. Suddenly he charged upright, shoving Bucky to the side.

 

“I _need_ to get out of here!” Steve lunged forward, then—hobbled by his wounded leg—crashed to the floor again. Bucky’s fear grew in leaps and bounds, someone might hear and Steve was not well.

 

“I can’t—I can’t do it again! Please, I can’t go back to how it was…”

 

“Shhh, please…” Bucky rushed to his side, but held back at the last minute unsure of what he could do for the man when in such a state. He can’t go back to what?

 

“Steve, we must be quiet.”

 

“Noooo…” The words soon melded into a low growl.

 

He gave up trying to garner his attention and instead shifted his focus to Steve’s left leg. Carefully he began rolling up the leg of Steve’s pants, peeling back the bandages. Bucky gasped. The wound was raw and foul. Red streaks spread outward from the mangled flesh and yellowish puss sat in the pockets of separated skin, secreting more clear liquid than blood. He knew next to nothing about medicine, but he knew with certainty this was an infection. A bad one and it was spreading. Steve needed medicine now or he was sure to die.

 

 

***

 

It didn’t seem possible, but somehow it was colder once the sun set in early afternoon. The blizzard blasted through town on the backs of an angry wind, ravaging the city with its thick flurries of snow. It was hard to see beyond an arm’s length ahead of oneself, yet Bucky trudged on. The cold was a spiteful ghoul, burrowing into his skin, pecking at his flesh through his myriad layers, excavating for his warmth and stealing what little he had left until his skin turned blue and numb. His eyes watered and nose ran, tears frozen on clumped eyelashes and nostrils clogged with icicles of snot. Keep moving, it was all he could do. Keep moving or risk hypothermia, there were no other options. 

 

Curfew would hit in mere hours and Rumlow was sure to be home by then, but Bucky was certain if he waited until tomorrow it would be too late. The only positive was the blizzard provided Bucky a fare amount of cover. It would be near impossible for someone to see Bucky unless they walked right into him. And he needed the cover now more than any other moment as he worked his way through the silent streets of Paris towards the outskirts of town where Steve had described the site of his crash to be.

 

Bucky had remembered Steve mentioning how he had buried the supplies he was able to recover from the wreckage before the Gestapo arrived. He didn’t know if there would be something of use there, but Bucky knew all pilots were given a medkit and so he whispered a little prayer under his breath—to a God who had long since abandoned him and he in return—for good fortune.

 

The crash site was easy enough to find, the bare bones of the plane still nose down in the earth, all it’s useful bits stripped clean by scavengers. Bucky surveyed the open expanse of land between the cottages for any signs of life, but it was useless. The land was like the blank canvass of a painting not yet formed, the world wiped clean by the endless deluge of snow. And the wind; it was cruel and unfettered as it swept across the empty expanse of frigid land. He had to move quick.

 

Certain he was in the clear Bucky rushed into the field. His legs sank in the snow up to his knees and Bucky cursed. It would be impossible to find anything in this snow, let alone dig into the frozen earth. “I must try,” Bucky wheezed to himself. A man’s life counted on it. Bucky would not fail this test. 

 

He withdrew the spade from his coat pocket and fell to his knees beneath the large chestnut tree where the supplies were to be buried. He had to hurry as images of Steve’s listless eyes haunted his mind like a ticking clock counting down till the moment they closed forever. 

 

This was a good man and Bucky would save him. He renewed his vigor and began to dig. First just snow, an endless pit of snow it seemed. Then finally earth. It was hard as metal and seemed to resist all attacks he levied against it with his small spade.

 

Bucky didn’t know how long it took, but it felt like hours of endless stabbing with the shovel before the frozen earth fractured enough for him to dig beneath the soil. His fingers were numb and had long lost their dexterity. Blisters had formed and burst, coating the spade’s handle in icy blood. The skin of his face was alive with pinpricks of fire, his very joints icing over liked rusted pieces of old machinery. Still he dug. Slowly, painstakingly so, a hole began to emerge as Bucky forced down on the shovel with all his weight and thrust the compact earth up. On what felt like the hundredth strike the shovel chimed like a bell against something metal. A box!

 

With both hands Bucky plucked the icy metal from the hole and snapped the lid open. Inside were the few supplies Steve had managed to salvage, but couldn't carry with him. A flare gun, a leather canteen burst at the seems with frozen water and a burlap sack. Bucky’s breath hitched at the red cross emblazoned on it. A medkit! Inside there was burn jelly and ointments, elastic adhesive and dressings, safety pins, and ampoules of clear liquid with syringes. One was marked morphine, the other penicillin. 

 

Bucky stuffed it all back in the metal case and stood, holding it against his chest under his coat. He was running now, adrenaline spiked through his body like a rush of intoxication after a shot of absinthe. It warmed him from the inside out as he raced back into the heart of Paris. Another prayer slipped from his lips, this time for Steve, to just hold on a little bit longer. 

 

The little cottages and farmhouses quickly gave way to row houses and tightly packed buildings of wildly varying architecture as Bucky progressed deeper into the city, pushing his body. He knew where the military checkpoints were by heart now and which alleys to take to avoid them. _RAT-TAT-TAT._ The quick-fire burst of a machine gun echoed through the city, carried by the howling wind. It could have been one block over or ten. Bucky couldn’t stop, he couldn’t pause to catch his breath. He didn’t have the time. It was quickly encroaching curfew, that he knew, so he pushed his legs harder. 

 

The wind’s howling only grew and Bucky worried, hidden under its icy breath, other screams might be carried along with it like the gun fire. Then he heard a real screech, close this time. Skidding on the icy steps outside his apartment building, Bucky harnessed the momentum to propel him upwards and in, slamming against the giant oak door and throwing it open. He exploded into the lobby and would have kept running, momentum carrying him all the way to his fifth floor walk up, had his passage not been blocked at the mouth of the stairwell by the piercing stare of Brock Rumlow.

 

“Hauptstrumfüror,” Bucky halted, legs locked together and back ramrod straight. He tried reigning in his breath, but it continued to wheeze out of him in large sputters of air. Slowly the warmth began to filter back into his body and he realized just how icy the calculating stare of Rumlow’s was. He had his trusty leather notebook out, in which he had been jotting down notes. Arnie Roth stood off just behind him with a pained expression on his normally vibrant face. 

 

“Bucky, should I be worried? It is nearly 7.”

 

Bucky bowed his head subserviently, knowing it was what Rumlow demanded, but it brought his blood to boil chasing off the last of the cold from his body. Yet part of him couldn’t help feeling triumphant, he had made it back before curfew and dinner had already been prepped long ago. He glanced between the two men and at the notebook again, which Rumlow snapped shut between his thumb and long fingers, nails chewed up stubs. 

 

“Dinner is ready whenever you would like to eat, sir.”

 

Rumlow didn’t seem to like this. A hand launched outwards to grab Bucky’s bicep in a searing grip and shoved him up the stairs, “Then go serve it and leave us—“

 

Bucky felt it slip from under his armpit as soon as Rumlow yanked his arm and there was nothing he could do to stop it. The terror ricocheted inside him like the fragment of a bullet as the metal box fell out of his coat and to the tiled floor with a loud clang that reverberated across the silent lobby. 

 

Everyone seized up. Bucky’s eyes bulged as he looked from Rumlow, furiously observing the foreign object, to Arnie and the sympathetic smear of fear across his powdered face. Immediately Bucky reached for the necessary lifesaving supplies when a black booted foot trapped his hand against the metal case.

 

“What do you have there, _my boy_?” Rumlow increased the pressure on Bucky’s hand and he whimpered. His bones so brittle from the cold he feared they might crack as easy as dry tinder.

 

“It’s—It’s—“ Bucky stammered, unable to formulate a response that could possibly explain this away before Rumlow demanded to look inside it. 

 

“You found it!” Arnie exclaimed, lunging forward to scoop up the box from beneath Bucky’s hand and Rumlow’s boot. He quickly held the case to his chest like it were a precious gift. 

 

Rumlow’s thick brows threaded together in one angry gash over his predatory eyes.

 

“Found what?” The demand made it very clear if he did not like the answer there would be trouble. Bucky couldn’t breath, his hand still trapped beneath Rumlow’s heel.

 

“My most précieux of artistic supplies, ma chérie!” 

 

Arnie seemed to pump up the volume of his flamboyance drastically now. Voice rising an octave, left arm waving about wildly as he cradled the case to his chest in the other. 

 

“This, Monsieur, contains my Maman’s old paintbrushes. I had sold them off for money some time ago when things got desperate. They’re made with the finest ivory, quite magnifique! Oh, sir, would you please,” Arnie indicated towards my still trapped hand and Rumlow’s eyes winded in shock at the brazen request, but grudgingly removed his foot so Bucky could stand upright. 

 

“It is my fault he comes back so late, I had heard word of them showing up at a market the other week and begged him to scour stalls for me, he must have braved the storm all for these, I'm just overcome by the gesture!”

 

Arnie swung forward dramatically and Rumlow jerked back, almost colliding with the wall behind him, as Arnie pinched Bucky's cheeks in gratitude. If Bucky didn’t know any better he’d say Rumlow was scared of Arnie, but why he could not fathom. The man was as effeminate as they came, not a threat at all to this officer and his gun.

 

“Well…” Rumlow surveyed Arnie with a distrustful eye, but kept his distance.

 

“Would you like to inspect, Monsieur?” Arne held out the metal case in his hand, fingernails glittering with a fresh coat of polish. Rumlow’s eyes honed in on the polish and he shoved Arnie, hard, away from him.

 

“Keep your distance, filthy man. I’m done questioning you for now, please remove yourself filth from my presence.”

 

Arnie collected himself and hurried up the steps without another word, free hand tenderly rubbing the spot on his chest where Rumlow had jabbed. Bucky stood stalk still, unsure what he should do and hoping to make it out as unscathed as Arnie. 

 

“There was a scene for those types of men back in Berlin,” Rumlow started, voice oily with subsiding rage. “Do you know what became of them?”

 

Bucky hesitantly glanced at Rumlow before bowing his head submissively again. He didn’t know, but he could guess.

 

“Let’s just say the area has been cleansed. They no longer prancing about in women’s dresses and throw their debauched parties. They’re an infection and you would be well-advised to keep your distance, the time will come for them here too if we’re lucky.”

 

A shiver ran down Bucky’s spine.

 

“I will not be home tonight, do not touch dinner and go hungry as punishment for your insubordination. I will know if any is eaten, is that understood?”

 

“Yuh-yes, Sir.”

 

***

 

Arnie had been waiting in the shadows of the stairwell for Bucky, handing off the medical supplies without comment. Bucky had wanted to shower him in words of gratitude, to tell him how clever he was and that Bucky did not think him an infection. Instead he settled for a soft _merci_ as Arnie gave a subdued smile and quickly shuffled off to his apartment, the flamboyance startlingly absent now.

 

Bucky was extremely thankful he had managed to get Steve to down some soup before he had left on his mission. Otherwise he too would have gone hungry tonight like the Barnes’ siblings. Peggy hadn’t understood what happened to warrant such punishment—her endless hunger a constant battle to begin with—and Bucky hadn’t done a good job of explaining, but what was there he could say? _I’m sorry you’re going hungry tonight ma sœur, but I've got an American pilot in the attic and he is sick so I had to smuggle meds from his downed plane into the house before he died and the stench of his rotting corpse alerted Rumlow. Have some tea._

 

_Non_ , she was safer in the dark. And now all Bucky could do was wait. He had injected the penicillin at the site of the wound on Steve as soon as he could sneak up to the attic. Steve had remained unresponsive to Bucky all night and he prayed he wasn’t too late. It wasn’t until dawn’s light that Bucky noticed Steve’s fever had broken; his labored breaths returned to normal.

 

"Mon dieu,” Bucky grabbed Steve’s hand and kissed it, lips tingling against his will at the feel of Steve’s tendons just beneath the skin, which flexed in response. Bucky pulled back in surprise, “You’re awake.”

 

It was both a statement and a question. One which Steve answered with the attempt at a smile on his haggard face. It quivered on his cheeks, unsteady but alive. The blizzard was lifting and with it the darkness that had settled over Bucky’s heart. Steve was going to survive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Close one for Steve this chapter. What come's next for the pair now that he's on a path to recovery? Here's a sneak peak from Chapter 5 to tide you over:
> 
> “You know I came to this city once, as a child,” Steve spoke up and Bucky halted his needlessly overwrought introspections. “I had never seen anything like it. The grand old architecture. The art found at every corner. The attention to detail carved into every stone edifice. That trip changed me, in more ways than I realized at first.”
> 
> It was Bucky’s turn to inspect Steve, staring intently through the dim light and motes of dust at the American next to him. A tug at the back of his mind, the haze of a long forgotten memory slowly rising to the surface, had him thinking...


	5. The New World Order

**Chapter Five - The New World Order**

 

The attic was dim and full of long spidery shadows, the sun having parted their world for continents safer than this. The flicker of the gas lantern was the only light available, casting a grainy quality to the room as Bucky knelt before Steve on the couch carefully applying clean bandages to his ankle. In his mind they were on the front lines of war, battles raging fiercely outside like thunderstorms while Bucky acted as field medic, scrambling to administer help in such poor conditions. There as only so much he could do, the rest was in the hands of God.

 

The room was thick with bottled emotion and a yearning to break the silence—an unpinned grenade counting down until detonation. But Bucky was single-mindedly focused on his task at hand and Steve consumed with writings in the journal Bucky had gifted him to pass the time. The war outside so far away now as they fell into an easy groove. 

 

The lacerations to Steve’s ankle looked markedly better since the last change of dressings. The open wound no longer pooled with blood as it finally began to clot, plus there was an absence of odious yellow puss. Even the red streaking of Steve’s veins around the site had faded. He was on a path to recovery and Bucky couldn’t help the sigh of relief that escaped his lips as he tightly coiled more gauze around the ankle. He hazarded a glance up at Steve. Bucky’s fingers halted their movements, tape limp between thumb and forefinger. Steve was caught staring over the top of his notebook. Intently so. It unnerved Bucky so he cleared his throat.

 

“Clean and proper,” Bucky applied the tape and sat back on his haunches, hands clamped on his thighs. “It’s looking great, but you’ve got a ways to go to full recovery. I know you might be getting stir crazy up here, but please keep your weight off it. We can’t risk another infection.”

 

“Of course,” Steve nodded in agreement, stare still locked on Bucky. 

 

There was a mischievous glint contained in his lively blue eyes, his face freshly shaven and strikingly young. Bucky was reminded how often these wars were propped on the backs of young men like them, no matter toll inflicted. 

 

“What?” Bucky challenged, insecure and on his feet. Steve put him off balance, but he was more than glad to have the American back to himself, conscious and engaged. 

 

“Nothing.”

 

“Spit it out.”

 

“You’re good at this, taking care of people.“ Steve grinned, his bewilderingly straight white teeth on view, notebook discarded on the floor. Bucky pursed his lips, insecure of his own slightly crooked smile.

 

“That’s certainly debatable.” 

 

Bucky turned from Steve and paced to the stained glass window. He didn’t know why what Steve said made him bristle. Maybe it was because he felt as if he were barely holding it together, let alone capable of providing for others. Rumlow was still on a rampage over the whole Arnie thing and withholding ration cards. Bucky hadn’t had a full meal in a week, Wanda’s family was probably on the verge of starvation, and Peggy was hiding things from Bucky. But he had no grounds to push her on it, what with the life-threatening secret of his own he was keeping just above their heads. 

 

No he certainly wasn’t good at this.

 

“I’m not dead yet, am I?”

 

Bucky spun around and shot Steve an unamused look, “Still too soon to joke about that.”

 

“M’sorry, Buck,” Steve’s head dipped to his chest.The firelight caught against the hard edges of Steve’s jawline and Bucky imagined tracing his fingertips along it, soft like satin, but sharp enough to cut. He shook his head. There was a danger in such thoughts. 

 

“You shouldn’t have risked it. I’m not worth your life.”

 

“Not this again,” Bucky sighed, moving back towards Steve, drawn to him like a moth to the flame. It might burn him, but the temptation was too great.

 

“I’m a soldier, Bucky. A dime a dozen. I signed up for this, to lay my life down for others. It makes me ill just to think I'm putting you and your sister in harms way. It’s the last thing I want. As soon as I’m better I should leave…”

 

Bucky’s stomach plummeted as if he had slipped from the fire escape and fell the six short stories to his untimely demise. Such a reaction seemed needlessly overwrought, yet the sensation lingered.

 

“Well it’s a good thing you don’t have a say in the matter.”

 

Bucky settled on the couch next to Steve who lifted the musky smelling blankets so Bucky could slide underneath, adjusting into a familiar and comfortable position against Steve’s side. He told himself again they were doing this because he didn’t want Steve to catch a cold again.There was no more penicillin to be had. The blizzard had blown past, but the nights still plunged below freezing and the small gas lantern offered little warmth. That’s why they had been partaking in this ritual almost every night since the infection. But another part of Bucky—the part he struggled hardest to ignore—savored this, their nightly embraces until the early dawn. Then Bucky would sneak back down to his room before Rumlow woke and languish in dueling waves of guilt and longing, promising himself never again knowing full well he’d break it by the end of the night.

 

If he weren’t so deprived of human touch, maybe he wouldn’t be so warped as to actually think Steve enjoyed this too. That they both longed to keep it going as long as possible, desperate to feel the other against them, but too fearful to speak the truth on both their minds. _Non_ , that was ridiculous. Bucky was just—as Steve said—a good caretaker.

 

So he adjusted in his spot, defiantly ignoring the way Steve’s body felt as if it were made of marble-like muscle with velvety soft skin stretched over top begging to be stroked. Steve seemed to have no such qualms. He pulled Bucky’s palm into his, tracing the scabs forming where blisters had been only a few days prior, a reminder of the price paid for his health. A pinched expression of pain overtook Steve’s smoldering face. If only he knew Bucky would happily pay it a hundred times over.

 

“You know I came to this city once, as a child,” Steve spoke up and Bucky halted his needlessly overwrought introspections. “I’d never seen anything like it. The grand architecture, older than anything back home. The art around every corner. The attention to detail carved into every stone edifice. That trip changed me, in more ways than I realized at first.”

 

It was Bucky’s turn to inspect Steve, staring intently through the dim light and motes of dust filtering through the air at the American next to him. A tug at the back of his mind—the haze of a long forgotten memory slowly rising to the surface—had him thinking. 

 

Steve continued, lost in his memories, “You might not have guessed, by looking at me now, but I was a very sickly child. Frail and delicate, I grew up poorer than a church mouse with my single mother. We lived in an industrial part of the working class area of Brooklyn.Lots of factories, hardened men, and filthy air not fit to breath. I think that kept me sick a long time. The rich only care about pollution when it affects them, for the poor like us, it’s survival of the fittest with the odds already stacked against us.”

 

Steve paused and took a deep breath in and out as if he were exhaling all the toxins. He was right, Bucky wouldn’t have guessed. This well built All-American looked anything but sickly now. _I can’t go back._ Maybe that’s what he had meant. The fever of his infection had warped his thinking, brought him back to those early childhood days of infirmary. 

 

“While Mother never would have said it, I don’t think she expected me to make it to adulthood. But everything changed when she started working as a secretary for Stark Industries and she met the man behind the name, a brilliant inventor. His riches and kind heart saved my mother’s life and mine, pulled us into a different world where the air was clean and the water safe to drink. He got me in some experimental gene therapy. Lots of big technical words and tests were performed, shot after shot, vile liquids and blood transfusions, until one day they dubbed me ‘cured.’

 

“To celebrate the clean bill of health Mr. Stark took my mom and I on our first trip. Here, _Paris_. I knew by then he loved my mother and she him. So I gave them a wide-berth that trip, running off on my own whenever I could. And I wanted too. It was the first time I had ever felt like a normal child. I could run with the other kids without losing my breath. I could climb things and get bruises that healed after a few days not a few months. 

 

“It was also my birthday and the first one where the future actually felt like something I could see, almost touch. It was the most beautiful summer of my life in one of the most beautiful places I have ever visited. It breaks my heart to think what has become of it. These violent men turning neighbor against neighbor and destroying whole villages. I only wish I could see the city now… but maybe it’s better to remember it as it was, not how it is now.”

 

“Yes,” Bucky sighed, he hadn’t meant for it to come out so despondent, but it had been nearing two years now under this occupation and many things in his home had changed beyond recognition. His heart ached for the loss. “Paris is resilient, it’s survived so much throughout its long history, it _has_ to survive this. _It has to…_ ” The last part spoken more to himself than Steve.

 

“I wish I could show you my Paris.”

 

“Why don’t you tell me about it?” 

 

Steve met Bucky’s stare with an earnest look of interest. His cheeks heated, but the dim light meant he’d never know. So Bucky launched into a detailed description of his favorite things about Paris, sharing stories and anecdotes about the places he frequented as a child. How, as a child, he would sneak away from family picnics to climb the legs of the Eiffel Tower before they hired full time security to keep the kids away. 

 

Or when Maman passed away from influenza and he ran away, thinking he could find the circus that popped up every year in le Jarden des Tuileries, only to discover the large field where they set up barren. So he climbed a tree by his favorite octagonal basin and watched men float their painstakingly crafted boats for the first time until Papa found him. 

 

And then the memory hit him. He didn’t know why it took so long to remember, but it had only been one afternoon in his life. He’d had many and hoped to have many more. But this one in particular never truly left him, just faded with time like a painting left in a sunny parlor; over time the bright hues of the paint and the vivid detail began to fade under the daily dose of sun until it was a ghost of its former self. But now the color came back to him, the detail and the emotion filling back in. Infectious laughter as two young boys danced before a troupe of violinists. 

 

“Steve,” Bucky’s voice spoke his name as if the word had been on the tip of his tongue for so long that remembering it was a personal victory against a riotous mind.

 

“Bucky?” Steve inspected Bucky closely. The gas lantern had long burned out and the night had slipped away without their noticing as they shared stories of their childhood. The room icy around them, but the air warm and cozy under the pile of blankets and tangle of limbs. Bucky’s face was alight and open with amazement as he returned Steve’s stare.

 

“When exactly did you visit Paris?”

 

“1930, I think?”

 

“Impossible…”

 

“What is?”

 

“That summer I met a frail boy at the Jardins by the basin. I never got his name, but I accidentally knocked him in. We ran from some bullies and danced together before vets of the Great War—“

 

“—and then my mom snatched me away, panicked at my disappearance, not letting me even say goodbye…”

 

Bucky and Steve stared at each other in matching amounts of dismay and shock. How was it possible this man was the same boy he had met at age six, so sickly and frail Bucky couldn’t believe he was four full years his senior. And yet here he was, alive and full of life, arms filled in with muscle and unbelievable strength. But it was the eyes, _his eyes_ , that told him it was true. They were the same ones he had stared into as a child and wondered how such self-assured confidence could be stored behind them when his body was so weak and small. 

 

“What—what are the chances?” Steve raked a hand through his hair and his light blonde locks stood up in disarray. 

 

The way Steve looked at Bucky changed for a moment. Something else, besides incredulity, was hidden behind those soulful eyes that looked suddenly a decade younger. Bucky wished he knew how to discern it, but the reality was he was just as astounded as Steve. Although, clear as day, he remembered the last thing he thought as Steve was dragged away from him by his mother. _Don't let go_.

 

“What’s that?” 

 

Bucky hadn’t realized he’d spoken aloud. Or when they’d gotten so close: his right leg trapped beneath Steve’s left leg so it could remain propped up, their heads mere inches apart. And something was pulling him closer. The raw magnetism of Steve.

 

“Nothing…” Bucky trailed off. He didn’t know what to say. What did it mean that they’d found each other again, in such extraordinary circumstances?

 

The air in the attic had turned thick, like molasses. It was hard to move, hard to think, impossible to breath. The air lodged in his throat, trapped by the infinite possibilities dangled before him like a sea of fishhooks ready to snare him in dangerous waters. Steve’s eyes seemed to glisten with those infinite possibilities. Yet they didn’t seem so dark and dangerous here. They seemed safe and hopeful. Bucky yearned to break free of this spell, but he couldn’t possibly tear his gaze from Steve’s.

 

Time seemed to have stopped. The rise of the sun put on hold while a French boy stared down an American pilot with hesitant eyes full of questions. Was this real? Were these thoughts okay? Did he feel it too? What was _it_?

 

And then the spell broke. The sun breached the horizon with its first dull rays of yellow in the somber winter sky and Bucky’s breath escaped his throat as his eyes turned from Steve’s.

 

“Don’t—” Steve’s voice fell off, clipped and strangled like his vocal chords had snapped from lack of use.

 

_Don’t what?_ Bucky wanted to ask, but instead he carefully disentangled his legs from Steve’s and rose from the couch, the first touch of cold air on his skin like a battering ram of reality.

 

“I’ve got to go,” Bucky ducked his head in shame and hurried from the attic, unable to bear looking back even once to face what he left behind. No he would keep running forward.

 

Downstairs, half his body shoved through the icy rim of the open window he stuttered and fell the rest of the way in. Rumlow had awoken. The door to Papa’s room alerted him to the fact with its squeaky hinges. Quickly latching the window shut Bucky sprang around the room like a headless-chicken loosened on the farm. He ran about blindly groping for clean clothes as he tore last nights items from his body. 

 

The door to his room swept open and Bucky stalled like a car engine suddenly without gas. Bucky’s hands swept down to cover his exposed lower half with the knitted sweater he had been about to pull over his head, eyes wide.

 

“Guten morgen,” Rumlow said, deep and gravely as he proceeded to enter the room as if nothing were amiss, eyes landing on Bucky’s body heavy as dual sledgehammers. 

 

A shiver traced a path across the top of Bucky’s skin, pulling gooseflesh on end. He’d never felt so vulnerable. Rumlow’s right hand was held behind his back and Bucky couldn’t pry his eyes away from it. What did it hold? Why was he in Bucky’s room so early? The arm moved, a fluid jerk forward and Bucky braced himself.

 

It was just a package of madeleines. Something he hadn’t seen since before the invasion and he’d be damned if his tastebuds didn’t salivate just a little at the memory of the freshly baked French staple on his tongue. Rumlow held it out before him with a smile hooked across his face from one oversized ear to the other. The chords in his neck strained with the smile. Bucky didn’t know what to do, stark naked before the Nazi and his proffered cookies.

 

“I got you something sweet,” Rumlow’s brown eyes twinkled, Bucky’s naked form reflected in his obsidian irises. “Think of it as an apology for the lack of rations this week. We’ve got a beautiful young baker at the Hôtel de Ville. She bakes us all sorts of wonderful French treats, but she told me these were a classic every frenchman loves.”

 

He shook the bag in Bucky’s face and there was no denying Rumlow was right. Bucky reached out tentatively with one hand, the other still furiously clasping the sweater before his groin. The bag of cellophane plopped in his hands with a sharp crinkle. Before he could withdraw Brock’s hand latched itself around his wrist like a hunter’s snare. His eyes large and expectant.

 

“Merci beaucoup, Hauptstrumfüror.”

 

“Bitte, my boy. And please, call me Brock.”

 

Rumlow let go of Bucky’s wrist, but lingered. 

 

“Th-thank you, Brock,” Bucky hated the name, hated the man more than words could describe. The deep boiling hate roiled his stomach like a bout of food poisoning and he had to grit his teeth to stave off the sneer of distaste from showing on his face. But he knew how this man operated. He wanted to feel powerful and Bucky had to carefully play into his psychosis or face the wrath. 

 

“Good, good. Please, get dressed, there’s an awful chill in your room. Can’t afford you catching a cold…” Rumlow’s eyes raked about the room as if searching for something. Then his stare returned back to Bucky, “I’ll see you tonight.”

 

Something in the way he said it forebode only troubling things to come. Bucky kept his eyes on the Nazi officer until he disappeared from his bedroom, through the living room and out the front door. Then Bucky tipped his hand to the side and the cookies dropped to the floor before he finished dressing. 

 

Bucky did not return to the attic all day. He ran his errands, hoping they would consume most of his day—even had a quick visit with Wanda—but still he returned with too much time on his hands and exhaustion creeping in at the edges. He could hear Steve upstairs, moving about every so often, and Bucky had to resist the urge to run up their and reprimand him. He couldn’t quite place why he was avoiding the American, but he knew if he went back up there he wouldn’t be able to control what happened next and that frightened him more than anything. More than the German invasion. More than the food shortages and the Nazi officer who came into his room with cookies.

 

Thankfully Rumlow had left an extra ration card on the kitchen countertop and Bucky was able to grab a few extra supplies for the Maximoff’s and still make a hearty meal for tonights dinner with meat; actual ground beef today. Which parts of the cow he didn’t particularly want to know, but he would happily eat it.

 

Peggy was in her room—often coming home and heading straight there without talking to Bucky and god how he wished he knew how to talk to her, comfort her, anything—when a commotion outside their door made Bucky drop the knife in his hand. It clattered to the floor, falling sharp edge first. He jumped out of the way and a scream shattered the quiet winter evening’s air like a jet fighter’s roar disturbed a peaceful night of slumber. 

 

Feet thundered down the hallway. More shouts and screams. The splintering of wood. Peggy’s body came hurtling out of her room. They made eye contact before she flew to the door and sprung it open. 

 

“Peggy!”

 

Bucky ran after her, fingertips grasping the air she had just occupied as she shot into the hall.

 

Men were shouting in German. Angry, violent words. Bucky’s blood raced in his ears and all exhaustion expelled from his body as his adrenaline spiked. 

 

“What’re you doing?” Peggy screeched.

 

Bucky managed to get to her before she reached the back of one of the Gestapo officers, clad in all black and rifle out, trained on someone in front of him. Bucky looped his arms around her midsection and yanked her back feet flying in the air, “Non!”

 

The nearest Gestapo turned to them and slashed his rifle at them. A menacing warning: _stay back._

 

“Get OFF me! What’re you doing to him? Monsieur Roth!”

 

Bucky only tightened the grip he had on his sister and he wrestled her back against the wall. There were at least ten men from the Gestapo crammed in the hallway. The door to Arnie’s apartment had been smashed open and two officers were dragging him out of his place by his arms, his legs dragging behind him. His face was a bruised and bloodied mess, having more resemblance to the ground meat Bucky had just purchased than the cherubic face Bucky knew. The lavender shawl wrapped tight around his neck looked like a bloodied noose.

 

The rest of the officers never took notice of the bystanders that now gathered in doorways and stairwells. They were used to crowds gathering and perhaps wanted that. They could have done this silently, but they wanted people to know. To feel Arnie’s terror as their own. 

 

There was another man and woman bound and gagged at the first landing on the stairwell below them. He didn’t know much of them other than they were active communists, often handing out pamphlets on the corner of their street. They were banged up, but nothing like Arnie. As the two officer’s dragged him by Peggy cried in horror. Arnie’s eyes snagged his as they passed and the terror in them was like that of a lamb that knew it was headed to slaughter. It burrowed deep into the center of Bucky’s being like a malicious tick and he knew it’d never be shaken. The deep well of horror opened inside him like pandoras box and paralyzed him. All around him doors closed and deadbolts slid into place.

 

“Arnie…” Bucky choked out, tears stinging at the back of his eyes for he knew this was Rumlow’s doing. That this was payment for his embarrassment at Arnie’s colorful hands and a warning to Bucky of whom really had the power. A reminder of what happened to men like Arnie. There wasn’t a place for them in this new world order.

 

It was over in minutes and then the hallway was deserted. The Gestapo vanished from sight like fiendish specters returned to the damned hell they came from. All that was left were the smears of blood on the floor and the muffled sobs of frightened neighbors. 

 

“How could you?” Peggy howled, twisting Bucky’s left wrist and slipping free of his grip. “HOW COULD YOU?”

 

“I—I… what could I do?” Bucky was shocked by her seamless escape and her words.

 

The livid stare of his younger sister was like an icepick to the heart. The judgement and fear in her eyes reflected in his own mind.

 

“Fight them! Isn’t that what you wanted? You wanted to leave me and join this cursed war and now that it’s here what do you do? Spend every fucking day playing house in this damned apartment—no— _mausoleum_ to a life stolen from us! What happened to you? What are you hiding from me? I can’t figure it out, but I refuse to be party to any of this any longer. I refuse to be some bystander complicit in the destruction of our way of life, of our neighbors!”

 

Her words were like glass on the wind, they blew into him with the force of a hurricane and shredded his already weakened pride. 

 

“I—I don’t…” 

 

“Arnie was a friend and we just watched him get dragged to the gallows. I’ll never forget this moment as long as I live. How everyone just stood by and watched, how you held me back. I hope you don’t either…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My apologies for the long wait. You know what they say about the best laid plans. I hope this chapter offered you lots of good Bucky/Steve time. They do seem to be growing closer, wouldn't you say? I'm excited cause I think we're getting to the really meaty stuff now of the story, no more groundwork to be laid. If you're enjoying this story at all please leave any and all comments, concerns, or even helpful critiques! I try my best to edit, but its difficult to be both author and editor and I always love hearing from my readers.


	6. The Dinner

**Chapter Six - The Dinner**

 

“How can they do _this_? These are French citizens, where’s our government? Surely the Vichy Government must be working to find a peaceful end with the Germans?”

 

Wanda whispered in hushed tones despite her outrage, as if they were under surveillance. It put Bucky on edge, maybe they were…

 

“The Vichy government’s a sham, you must know this by now. They’re working with the Nazi’s I’m sure of it and they’ll let them do whatever they want as long as they let them be. We’re on our own here. No one is coming to save us.”

 

It was a horrible realization, but after the round up in his own building Bucky knew it to be true. The British were too busy bunkering down on their island to give help, the American’s separated from them by an entire ocean, and the Nazi’s now had an ironclad grip on all of mainland Europe. If anyone was going to help them it had to be themselves. But he didn’t know how when they were starving. When they didn’t know who to trust.

 

“Mon dieu… I—I’ve heard rumors that they’re detaining people in these camps outside the city. Terrible places filled with disease and suffering. I just don’t know what to believe, there are so many rumors flying fast I can’t keep up.” 

 

Bucky gnawed on his bottom lip in worry. These were not good signs. He wondered if that was were Arnie was now?

 

The tea cup clattered against its saucer as Wanda attempted to lift the last remaining china of Bucky’s Maman to her lips—the rest sold off long ago. Bucky’s stare couldn’t help but be drawn to the newest barbaric law forced upon the Jewish population of France. A yellow star had been sewn onto a piece of cloth wrapped around her upper right arm. It was a requirement that alls Jews wear it for identification purposes—no exceptions. What the insidious endgame was, Bucky could not fathom.

 

“I hate that damned star.”

 

“Don’t,” Wanda gasped, tears welling in her big brown eyes. She couldn’t even bring herself to look at it.

 

Her black hair had a dull ashen quality to it, like her skin. She seemed to be fading before his very eyes, incorporeal, ghostly. If he reached out to touch her would she even be there? So many things were slipping through his fingers, she couldn’t be next. Reflected at him in her eyes was all the pain and worry and dread he had felt the other night when the Gestapo came for Arnie, and Madame Roginer and her partner Claude—Bucky didn’t know his last name and now he never would.

 

“Where’s Peggy? How’s she taking it?”

 

“She’s spending the night at a friend’s, she hasn’t talked to me since, save for when she asked if I had seen Natasha. She’s worried she got rounded up too, but I don’t believe it for a second. That woman is a hard one, she left everything in Moscow behind to come here, I’m sure she would have no problem dropping it all and abandoning this land too for somewhere safer, if such a place exists.”

 

Still the idea troubled him. That Natasha had been swept up in the horrors of last night, never to be seen again. Another neighbor and friend gone. Soon there would be no one left but the Aryan race. 

 

Bucky sighed and looked out the window next to the dining room table. The sun had worked its way out from behind the heavy winter clouds and one could be forgiven for thinking it was the first day of spring. It was the only good sign in weeks, for it did mean winter was not long for this world. The promise of spring should have brought a wellspring of hope with it. The promise that all hardships end and life can begin anew. But not this time. Instead all it brought was the threat of a more active German presence as they stretched their legs and executed plans made by the warmth of their log fires during the harsh winter. 

 

“Peggy’s been hard and cold as a river stone in winter to me. I don’t know what she expected me to do—“

 

“There’s nothing you could have done!” Wanda admonished. “You must keep your head down or they’ll single you out. You mustn’t provoke them or they could take you too.”

 

“So we just let them do this to our neighbors and friends? When is the cost too high just to survive?”

 

Bucky didn’t know what was right anymore, but he knew the propaganda the Nazi’s were selling was wrong and that they relied on good people doing nothing so they could execute their plans. It had all the hallmarks of a culling. The types Nazi’s thought degenerate and infecting a pure bloodline. It was all nonsense. Except the frightening thing was how some good French people were now buying in to it. Wanda couldn’t even shop at the ration stores if she wanted to. 

 

“It can’t be too high, not when we protect those we can by the means we have. That means keeping them safe and fed. You’re doing that.”

 

Wanda’s hair was pulled up tight in a bun behind her head, the severity of it pinched her skin back at the temples and kept her eyes in a wide-eyed state of perpetual shock. He wished for the days when they saw each other and there was only laughter in the air and dopey grins on their faces. 

 

“You’ve done so much for us Bucky, don’t ever think you’re not doing enough.”

 

“It’s not. Not when people are dying.”

 

“You’re not responsible for everyone, James.”

 

Wanda scrutinized Bucky for a minute, “There’s something different about you. An assuredness I don’t think I’ve ever seen on you. I must admit it frightens me a little.”

 

“How so?” He scoffed. 

 

“I don’t know, I can see it in your eyes. You used to seem so lost, like a puppy dog left in the park by its master. But now all I see is a fire burning and I pray you know how to control it; channel it. I can’t lose you.”

 

Reaching between the sets of teacups Bucky rested his hand atop Wanda’s. He wanted to reassure her when the front door unlatched and opened. He quickly withdrew his hand into his lap as Rumlow entered. Out of the corner of his eyes he saw Wanda stiffen like a steel rod had jammed itself along her spine.

 

“Hauptstrumfüror Rumlow, is there—“

 

“Tsk-tsk, what did I tell you?”

 

“My apologies, _Brock_ …”

 

A thin smile like that of a viper spread across Rumlow’s squared jaw, his black eyes flickered to Wanda and her star then back to Bucky. 

 

“Who’s our guest?”

 

“I w-was just leaving,” Wanda stood and her knees clipped the edge of the table, rattling the teacups and sloshing its contents on the table. She bit the inside of her cheek to stall a cry of pain. 

 

“You don’t have to—“

 

“Non, I really must, my brother needs looking after.”

 

And just like that she was gone, maybe she had been a specter all along.

 

“The people you associate with are becoming problematic, my boy,” Rumlow picked at some meat caught in his teeth, rolling it around over his tongue before spitting it out on the floor. “A semite and a sexual deviant are not at all trustworthy company. Degenerates bring us all down with them. Do you know where her family even gets its money from?”

 

“Nowhere, cause _you_ and _your_ army stole it all,” Bucky stood from his chair, chest swelled in defiance. He didn’t care if his outburst got him in trouble. He was sick of the lies.

 

A vile glint lit up Rumlow’s eyes like a doorway to hell unlatched, “It is not possible to steal what has already been stolen, my boy. The Jews are a sneaky bunch and what we do to them is necessary for the progress of a healthy society. You would do well to remember that the next time you see your… _friend._ I won't be able to help if the wrong people catch you with such filth. These are dangerous times.”

 

“Only if one has a conscience.”

 

Fire spat from Bucky’s eyes like oil on an open flame. Rumlow sniffed, his nose twitching upward, and then jerked forward with a balled fist. Bucky was on the floor, crumpled and wheezing for breath, stomach a bright flare of pain like his abdomen had been cracked open like a raw egg smacked against the edge of a frying pan. His eyes rolled back into his head as he coughed and spluttered for breath. Somewhere in the distance he could hear Rumlow laughing. Far off, like listening through a wall when he was a child and his parents had an argument, only able to make out every other word, Bucky heard Rumlow say he would be leaving town for a week. Something about a small site outside town needing oversight. Preparations to make.

 

“And it’s interesting, I’ve been informed not a single piece of ivory was found in that filth’s apartment. I’m beginning to worry you’re not the boy you want me to believe you are. I will be keeping tabs. Be good while I’m gone…”

 

By the time Bucky regained his breath and pulled himself off the floor Rumlow was gone again. Rumlow knew he was a liar, but about what he was still in the dark. Bucky had to keep it that way. In the ensuing silence Bucky went to work cleaning up the spit and tea, his stomach smarting ever time he bent over. He stewed in a sudden surge of loneliness. It blanketed his body with an indolent weight and he couldn’t help but imagine himself like one of those many discarded objects in the attic, long forgotten by those around it and left to gather dust as time passed it by.

 

If he looked outside his front door he would see the apartment down the hall from his, open and barren as Bucky felt. The scavengers had seemed almost clairvoyant in their ability to know when a place was abandoned because before dawn of the morning after the raid Arnie’s place had been stripped of all its valuables. It would be almost easy to forget a flamboyant artist had lived there with bright colored draperies and easels thick with oily paintings stacked on them like piles of old mail. Now it was all gone, what had once made up such a bright individual scattered across the city and sold off on the black market never to be seen again just like him.

 

If Bucky had any tears left he would have cried. But he was strangely absent. A vacant glaze brushed over his eyes as he worked about the apartment, cleaning up what few belongings they had left: the picture frame with Maman and Papa after their courthouse wedding, her belly already bloated by pregnancy; an old copy of _Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passé_ by Charles Perrault from his father’s collection; and a print of Monet’s the Water Lily Pond framed on the wall. These were things that should have brought Bucky some type of joy to see, but all he could muster was an air of cool indifference like the bubble of indigestion in his throat.

 

Just then a thought hit him like a bird striking a meticulously cleaned window. A realization and with it the gradual return of life to his body. Rumlow was gone. Peggy also gone for the night.

 

Bucky slipped into Papa's room and found Rumlow—in his haste to leave—had left behind all his extra ration cards. Bucky grinned to himself and hurriedly dressed to run his errands. The day might well be salvaged. 

 

***

 

With Bucky as a sort of crutch they were able to maneuver Steve down the fire escape to Bucky’s bedroom. Thankfully the side of the building the stairs were on was above a rarely used alley so he wasn’t worried about some pedestrian glancing up and catching them. His stomach clenched, black and blue from the gut punch earlier that day, but his grunts of pain were easily masked as symptoms of the difficult task of getting Steve through the window. He still couldn’t stand on the injured foot, but he was stronger than Bucky and could hold his own weight without Bucky suffering much. 

 

Once in his bedroom they stalled for a second, Steve’s backside resting against the windowsill as he caught his breath, left hand firmly gripping his shoulder. He seemed to eat up the room before him with hungry eyes. A man released from his prison cell and finally rediscovering the world outside.

 

“This is yours?”

 

Bucky nodded.

 

“I like it.”

 

Bucky looked around in disbelief. There was an unmade bed with the moth-holed blanket he had traded from the attic so Steve could have his thicker comforter. The desk in the corner was particularly empty, the books and wood carvings that used to litter it sold off well over a year ago. All that remained that gave Bucky a sense of ownership in it was the wall above his bed where Peggy and he had once painted a family portrait with landmarks from around Paris. Steve studied it closely, hand on Bucky’s shoulder almost turning into a caress. 

 

“C’mon, I’ve got some surprises,” Bucky slung Steve’s arm back over his shoulder, trying to contain his smile. A weightless thrill of sensations roiled in his stomach and he wasn’t sure why. 

 

The dinner table was set. The few nice pieces of silverware and plates left were out, and four long stem candles lit on the table atop a thin runner of white lace.The sun was a luminous ember in the dying sky and the flicker of the candlelight cast warm shadows about the room. It felt like an intimate setting at a romantic restaurant and suddenly Bucky felt very insecure. Why had he done that? He had felt some inexplicable urge to spruce the place up before Steve came down and now he couldn’t help but feel it was all very on the nose.

 

“I—“ Bucky cleared his throat, “I made us dinner. I figured you could use a real home cooked French meal, no more stews and cold leftovers smuggled up late at night.”

 

Steve took everything in, the glow of candle light catching on his skin like the sun on the Sienne river at high noon. He was silent for a good minute and in that time Bucky’s mind lobbed insecurities, one after another, like firecrackers set off in the cavern of his skull. 

 

Finally, Steve spoke, “No one has ever been so thoughtful,” He appraised Bucky from the side, eyes sparkling with the last rays of sunlight. “This is too much, you’re sure you wont get in trouble with your officer?”

 

“He’s not _my_ officer, and he’ll never know.” 

 

“Yes, no one could ever own you.” Steve’s spoke with such unwavering conviction it almost knocked Bucky unsteady. His grip tightened around Steve’s midsection and he could swear he almost felt a resulting spike in Steve’s heartbeat; his torso stiffened under hand. 

 

“Before we eat I thought maybe you’d want a hot bath, it’s already drawn for you…”

 

“Did I die up in that attic? Have I gone to heaven?” 

 

Steve pinched himself, then Bucky, whom swatted his hand away and began leading him down the hall. Bucky’s smile was fierce, shameful insecurities quickly dispersed as a sense of pride swelled in his chest. It expanded to fill all the spaces in his chest, displacing his anxieties and fears that clung to him like hungry leeches until he was so full he wasn’t sure he would even be able to eat dinner.

 

While he left Steve to undress and soak in the hot bath Bucky returned to the kitchen to put the finishing touches on their meal. By the time Steve called for him from the bathroom dinner was served. Half an herb-roasted hen with root vegetables in a demi-glace and a toasted baguette from his favorite boulangerie that was still miraculously open, albeit only two days a week. 

 

Once returned to the table and Steve carefully seated, his skin flushed pink from the hot tub, Bucky fled back into the kitchen shaking his head clear. For a moment, Papa’s clothes tightly fitted to Steve’s body, Bucky had had an image of his father: young, innocent, just arriving on this godforsaken continent to fight forces he knew nothing of. Alone and so far from home. Bucky wanted more than anything to provide a little respite; a chance to feel at home for this man, even if just for one night.

 

“I have one final surprise.”

 

“I’m not sure I can handle more, this looks amazing and—“ Steve paused and inhaled deeply, “Smells exquisite. I didn’t realize how famished I am.”

 

“Consider this our dessert,” Bucky was beside Steve now and he pulled from behind his back a bottle of champagne. He uncorked it, the pop soft and unimposing, like a professional. Then he leaned over Steve’s right shoulder and poured the effervescent golden liquid into his glass. His torso lightly grazed Steve’s shoulder and their breaths hitched in unison—although Bucky only heard his own and the distinct pop of champagne bubbles in the glass flute.

 

“Bon appétit.“ Bucky returned to his seat, pouring himself a glass.

 

Steve dug in, scarfing down his first few bites before he seemed to remember he had company, and time to enjoy, and so he slowed down, stealing a sip of champagne and a look at Bucky. He had yet to touch his food as he watched Steve gorge himself.

 

“I’m making a fool of myself, I apologize. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a real meal at a table with anyone other than glutinous soldiers. We usually had to eat fast as possible and return to our duties. I do have manners, I promise. My mother even taught me about using the fork in my left hand, prongs curving down— see.”

 

Steve demonstrated with the fork held down, although he had a tough time chasing a piece of potato around the plate until he finally stabbed it unceremoniously. 

 

Bucky laughed, “Please don’t apologize. I know you have manners, I’ve seen them on display upstairs. This meal is for you, you’ve been trapped in that attic for so long you need a chance to relax and enjoy yourself. Please, don’t feel inhibited in the slightest.”

 

Steve flashed a smile and a piece of thyme was stuck between his teeth. Bucky snorted, holding back another laugh, and point at his teeth. Steve picked it clean.

 

“Americans.” Bucky shook his head, still chuckling. 

 

“We’re a gruesome lot, I know.” Steve winked, then he purposefully smeared some demi-glace across his upper lip like a mustache. Bucky couldn’t help it this time, his head fell back and laughter roared out his open lips.

 

By the time they finished their meal all the champagne was gone and the room a brooding amber of candlelight. Bucky had never felt so sated, in more ways than he could put his finger one. And he couldn’t remember the last time he had laughed this much. It was depressing to think back on his life the past year and half and realize how little laughter occupied it. Before the war had started he had had plenty of things to laugh about, and people to laugh with. That number seemed to be ever shrinking. 

 

Steve swayed easily in his chair, as if to an invisible beat. His cheeks flushed rouge. An absent smile stuck to his strong jaw and his hands clasped behind his head, biceps bulging. Bucky gave him an appreciative glance, the alcohol hot in his veins. 

 

“You’re drunk.”

 

 

“So are you.”

 

It was a stare off. Who would break first? Bucky’s jaw locked in defiance; he would not lose. But something changed. The game shifted. Steve’s eyes opened and Bucky fell in them like a child dove into a cool, silver-blue spring lake in the French Alps. It invigorated and set his skin alive with shivers of gooseflesh.

 

“I don’t think I’ve ever had such a perfect night in my entire life.”

 

Bucky nodded in agreement. And then his smile fell, eye contact broken.

 

“Did I say something wrong?” Steve’s hands unlaced and landed on the table with a thud as he leaned forward.

 

“Non, not at all,” Bucky waved him off, trying to shove the dark feeling back where it came, but it resisted and so he spoke. It wasn’t something he was used to doing, but he felt safe and emboldened by the alcohol—by Steve. “Tonight has been great. So great I—I feel guilty.

 

“The very world is coming apart at the seems. I’m scared for those I know. My sister, Wanda and her family, all those taken, never to be seen again. What has the world become? And what have I? These things I’m feeling, I know I shouldn’t… It’s wrong, especially at a time like this. And yet I can’t help it. I feel horrible because I’ve never been so happy, in the most inappropriate ways, while the world has never been so sad…”

 

His entire body was cinched up, a piece of string tied up the length of his spine and pulled taut. Had he shared too much? Why couldn’t he just keep his mouth shut around Steve. He wasn’t used to sharing so much. He wore his vulnerability uncomfortably. 

 

“It’s okay, Bucky, I promise it’s okay…” Somehow Steve had got up from his chair and hobbled around the oakwood table—on his one good leg—to Bucky’s side. His right hand, hot as a bed of coals, gripped Bucky’s shoulder again and squeezed. “You’re allowed to feel happy even when times are bad. If not then why am I here? Why are you? There has to be something worth fighting for, otherwise we might as well sit back and let the world go to hell in a hand basket.”

 

He paused for a second, thinking something over.

 

“And I’ll tell you one thing. You found me for a reason. You saved my life, _twice_ , and if anyone deserves a night of happiness it’s you. So don’t you ever feel guilty for your own happiness, you hear me Bucky? I won’t stand for it.”

 

Steve’s voice was ragged, his breath coming in great heaving gasps that caused his chest to rise and fall in giant waves, the outline of his pecs clearly defined against Papa’s linen shirt in the diffused candlelight. The juxtaposition of it all fucked with Bucky’s head.

 

“You couldn’t stand for it even if you wanted,” Bucky snorted, eyeing Steve’s injured ankle cradled between them, Steve’s weight carefully balanced on the table’s edge. Steve gawked at him, wide-eyed in shock, and then they both busted up with laughter. It came in stomach-crunching waves like a pummeling of fists. The laughter streamed from a deep well of absurdity, almost endlessly so. It was as if they were caught in an echo chamber where it was just their laughter fed back and forth between them on loop, gaining incredible steam until Bucky couldn’t breath and if he didn’t stop he might just die; his bruised stomach screaming in agony.

 

There was a magnetism in the room. A quality to the air that felt almost solid, a force at the lower half of Bucky’s back, like a palm guiding him forward. He pushed against it, bullheaded in his desire to ignore its presence. Steve didn’t seem so adamant. 

 

“Your laugh is infectious, like a hit of the good stuff the doc gives and—heavens forgive me—I crave it. Dream of it. Yearn to hear just a sliver of it. If I could make you laugh like that, hear it throughout the rest of my days, I would never ask for another thing. It would be enough.”

 

Bucky didn’t know where to look. Steve was all around him. His eyes so sincere, his touch so electrifying Bucky short-circuited like the old building’s wiring. This wasn’t something he ever dreamed possible. And yet here it was, big blue eyes staring him right in the face. Somewhere Bucky heard the scrape of chair legs against the floor as he stood, but that seemed so far off over the sound of his blood rushing in his ears; of Steve’s deep, shuddering breaths. Bucky wet his lips. Steve’s eyes followed the glide of his tongue then rose back to Bucky’s sheepishly at having been caught. But the fire, the _fire_ behind those deep ocean blues was alive as ever.

 

“There is nothing wrong with you,” Steve spoke tenderly, as if reading his mind. Bucky thought it might have broken the spell if they spoke, but instead it was the final incantation that sealed the spell cast round his heart. “I feel it too—” 

 

Lips landed on cushiony lips like the meeting of rose petals in the wind. Swept up and carried away on the breeze of their on heady intoxication. Bucky cupped his hands round the nape of Steve’s neck, fingers nestling in the hair at the base of his skull, and pulled him closer, deeper. Steve hiccuped a gasp and Bucky slid past the gate of his lips for a taste of the American who’d invaded his mind; waking or sleeping, there was no shaking him free. The fizz of champagne still lingered on Steve’s tongue and tingled against his own. His upper lip still had the tangy hint of demi-glace. 

 

Steve seemed to waken from his own haze as both his arms wrapped around Bucky’s back and squeezed until they were flush against one another. Steve’s body was a solid mountain of muscle against his, each ridge and valley of flesh an unknown wonder Bucky yearned to explore. Steve’s touch overwhelmed. To be held and to hold. These were the things he dreamed he’d never have. 

 

Bucky snapped his eyes shut, sketching every detail of the moment on the backs of his eyelids so as never to be forgotten. Tears leaked free at the corners. They mingled with the wet kiss, which deepened as Steve angled Bucky’s head back. Somewhere deep down, at the lower base of his stomach which buzzed alive as a hive of bees, a groan was birthed from repressed desire. It slipped free of his throat and into the air around them, greeted by an equally enthusiastic grunt from Steve.

 

And then, somewhere far off, but startlingly close in the quiet candlelit room of Bucky’s home, the crack of machine gun fire tore through the night air like the blare of sirens at midnight. 

 

They fell apart, Bucky’s lips plump and red and numb to the touch. Steve’s head shot to the windows, but it was nothing but a square of black silk impenetrable to the human eye. Three more bursts followed the first crack of fire and then all was silent.

 

When Steve turned back into Bucky he saw the closed off walls in Bucky’s eyes. Bucky extricated himself from Steve’s arms and took a loathsome step back. Space opened between them, the rending of the earth from the sea. A seemingly insurmountable space. Steve’s eyes begged to find a way across, but Bucky’s head was shaking and he suddenly felt faint, lightheaded.

 

“I-I’m sorry, I sh-shouldn’t have done that. It was wrong—wrong of me,” Bucky didn’t know where the stutter came from as he stumbled over the jumble of words and thoughts in his mind. A terrible wave of shame crashed through his body like he had suddenly been submerged in the icy waters of the North Sea. His blood was thinning, running sluggishly slow even as his cheeks flushed with an intense bloom of embarrassment. However he had felt, whatever fantasies he had indulged with that kiss, were clearly just that: illusions, lies better left to the imagination. _People went missing for this, for far less…_

 

“I’ll take you back to your room.”

 

There was no room for debate and Steve thankfully made none. Bucky didn’t know if he had the willpower to resist if he had put up a fight. 

 

They were careful to touch the bare minimum necessary on the trek up the fire escape to the attic. The air was a bitter cold that matched the icy blood of Bucky’s veins and the terrible squall that had stormed his heart. Steve grunted in pain as Bucky pushed him through the porthole, but remained silent until remanded to his jail cell and couch. If Bucky’s back hadn’t already turned to face him it might have been enough to break his resolve.

 

“Bucky…” The silence seemed to stretch on interminably, speaking more than either of them could ever say. “Stay?”

 

The warmth of his arms and wooly blankets, the icy air fighting to get in, but held at bay by their collective will and body heat was a flash memory so powerful it almost sucked him back to the couch. Then Bucky’s eyes hardened as he saw Arnie hauled off by the Gestapo, the lamb to slaughter look in his eyes; a recognition it was all, finally, over. Bucky’s bowels dropped out from beneath him, a firm _non_ in his mind strangling the volley of _oui_ 's his heart howled, and he stepped out the porthole into the icy black night.


End file.
